Bones (2 page)

“Great observation!” Dr. Bob exclaims. He slaps a pillow-shaped lump covered in black writing. “The bones are often fragile, and we find them in awkward places—hillsides, cliffs, quarries. And with the short summer work season, the priority is getting specimens dug out and protected. We dig out the bone and the surrounding rock and wrap it in burlap sacking and plaster of Paris. It's like the cast a doctor would put on if you broke your leg. A doctor would treat you the same way we treat dinosaur bones. We're dinosaur doctors.” Dr. Bob laughs at his own joke.

I force a smile and ask, “So what's in this one?”

He leans forward and peers at the writing. “Ah, this is a thigh bone from one of the horned dinosaurs, maybe even
Triceratops
.” He chuckles. “
Dr. Bob rocks,
like Triceratops
,” he reads. “Sometimes our students like to write on the cast. Not the best poetry, but if it doesn't interfere with the scientific information, I don't mind.”

“Where's the rest of it?” Annabel asks.

“And there you have hit the nail on the head,” Dr. Bob says. Our confusion must show on our faces, because he continues, “Most people think dinosaur skeletons come out of the ground complete. Not so, and I'm afraid it's our fault.” He falls silent as if he regrets a horrible mistake he's made.

“How is it your fault?” I ask.

“You think all our skeletons out there”—he waves his arm in the direction of the display halls—“are complete?”

I'm not sure if he expects a reply. He goes on before I can decide. “They're not. They're composites, casts of bones from several different individuals. And where we don't have a bone, we make it up.”

Dr. Bob smiles at the look of shock that passes over Annabel's face. “Oh, very scientifically,” he says. “For example, if we have two pieces of a backbone, it's a good guess that the missing piece between them looked much the same. Our reconstructions are as accurate as we can make them, but some dinosaurs are only known from one bone.”

“So there must be a lot of dinosaurs that we don't know anything about,” Annabel says. “Dinosaurs where we haven't found that one bone.”

“Exactly.” Dr. Bob moves back into enthusiastic mode. “There must be thousands of them. That's the thrill that keeps us all going. What's inside the next piece of rock? Will it be something we haven't found before? Will it be something we haven't even imagined before?”

“Like the bones you're digging out on Mom's farm?” I ask.

“Ah, counting chickens again. Whatever we have there has some unusual characteristics, but we won't know for sure until we get the specimen back to the lab and clean the bones out of the rock matrix.”

“But you said that can take years,” I say.

“Yes, it can, but we do work faster if there's a sign that we're onto something unusual. Can't be in a rush in this job. After all, the bones aren't in a rush. They've been waiting for us for sixty-five or seventy million years. We do try to get the bones out of the ground and onto these shelves here as fast as possible. We don't want to lose them.”

“Lose them? They're not going to walk away,” I say in a weak attempt at a joke. No one laughs.

“Losing them is a very real problem,” Dr. Bob says. “There's a lot of money in dinosaur bones.”

“Sue!” Annabel exclaims.

“Exactly,” Dr. Bob agrees happily.

I'm losing touch with the conversation. “Who's Sue?”

Annabel says, “Only the largest, most complete
T. rex
skeleton ever found.”

“Discovered by a private company in the sixty-five-million-year-old Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota in 1990,” Dr. Bob adds.

“There was a huge controversy about who owned Sue. The farmer whose land she was found on, the company who discovered her or the government,” Annabel says. She and Dr. Bob are competing to fire information at me.

“A court case gave Sue to the farmer,” Dr. Bob continues breathlessly, “and he put her up for auction in 1997, where she sold for—”

“Seven point six million dollars to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago,” Annabel interrupts.

“We were lucky with Sue,” Dr. Bob acknowledges. “There was so much publicity that the museum could raise the money to buy her. That meant she could be studied. That doesn't usually happen. Museums don't have limitless money, and if it's not
T. rex
, it's not news. Countless wonderful fossils”—a look of sadness flits across his face—“have disappeared into private collections where they can't be studied. Also, if the bones are not properly removed, we lose huge amounts of information about the world the animal lived in.”

“Didn't they discover that Sue had a healed broken shoulder and ribs?” Annabel asks.

“They did,” says Dr. Bob. “She also had arthritis, a parasite that left holes in her bones and a bone infection.”

“Wow,” I say, as much in awe of Dr. Bob and Annabel's double act as at the information. “A dinosaur skeleton sold for seven point six million dollars?”

“Yeah,” Annabel says. “Incredible, eh?”

“So you see, there's a lot of money to be made stealing bones,” Dr. Bob says, “and it's quite easy. Most fossil sites are in out-of-the-way places. A few hundred bucks can buy a lot of information from an underpaid, overworked museum employee.”

I nod, remembering the billionaire Humphrey Battleford, who traveled the world to buy and steal works of art for his collection. I wonder if he's into valuable fossils. Annabel is thinking the same thing. “I bet Battleford has a few choice specimens hidden away in one of his mansions,” she says.

“Battleford!” Dr. Bob becomes excited again. “What do you know about Humphrey Battleford?”

“We ran into him in Australia,” I say. “Why?”

“He's a legend in the fossil black market. He has deep pockets and will dig a long way into them for a fossil that catches his fancy. He has a better collection of fossils than most museums, but no one ever sees it. Legend has it that he has an almost perfectly preserved
Velociraptor
, complete with internal organs and feather impressions in the rock around it.” Dr. Bob's gaze drifts wistfully. “Supposedly,” he adds, returning to us, “he also has the only skull of an otherwise unknown early human species.”

“From what you say,” I point out, “it's a lot of work to get a dinosaur out of the rock. No one could do that without being noticed.”

“That's right,” Dr. Bob agrees. “But there's nothing to stop a major dig being undertaken as long as the landowner agrees. Your mom and the others on the farm gave us permission to dig in the coulee.”

“Someone like Battleford wouldn't be interested in the skeleton on Mom's farm, would he?” I ask.

“I hope not,” Dr. Bob says. “People like Battleford seem to have networks of spies in areas where valuable fossils are found. If word got out that we have something unusual, who knows? But don't worry. If he's looking for dinosaur specimens, he's probably in China. That's where the most exciting finds are being made—and also, unfortunately, where it's easiest to steal fossils.”

Annabel jumps back and crashes into me as a man pushing a low trolley suddenly appears around a shelf of boxes. “Watch where you're going,” he says.

“Careful,” Dr. Bob says. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

The man is short and dressed in dark blue overalls. He has a square face and black eyebrows that meet in the middle above his nose. His head is shaved, but he has a goatee and moustache that match his eyebrows. Above the pocket of his overalls are the words
Paterson
Scientific Courier Service—Nothing Too
Big or Too Small
.

“Sorry,” the man says sullenly. “Got to take these out to the truck. Shipping them down to the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. All the paperwork's done.” He waves at a clipboard of forms on top of the specimens.

“Okay,” Dr. Bob says. “But be more careful. Those trolleys are heavy.”

The man grunts and moves away.

“The best beetle eyebrows I've seen in a long time,” Annabel comments. “He even has the sullen look to go with them.”

Dr. Bob chuckles. “Beetlebrow—good name for him. He may not be the happiest courier in town, but he's the cheapest.”

“Why do you send fossils to a museum in Montana?” I ask.

“We're short of space and staff, so sometimes we send specimens out to private companies for preparation and to other museums for research. Now let's go and look at the preparation labs.”

As Dr. Bob shows us the rest of the museum's back rooms, I think of Battleford and his dog, Percy, and hope that they are as far away as China.

Chapter Three

“I feel like a chicken on a barbecue,” Annabel says, wiping the sweat off her brow with her sleeve. It's incredibly hot. We are in the dry creekbed of the coulee that cuts across the end of Mom's farm. Below us, where the dirt road ends, there are two Tyrrell Museum trucks, the one the field crew came in and, behind it, the one Dr. Bob brought us in. Above us, on the side of the coulee, a large square tarp shades a flat area where three grubby students in shorts, T-shirts and bandannas or wide-brimmed hats are huddled on hands and knees.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Badlands trap the heat. I wouldn't want to come here without water.” I haul my bottle out of my daypack, take a swig and pass it to Annabel.

“This is nothing,” Dr. Bob adds cheerfully. “You can't get lost in a narrow coulee like this. In the big areas of badlands—over at Dinosaur Provincial Park or down in Montana, for instance—you can get turned around and spend a long time stumbling around. Then if it rains, you can't get out. The popcorn is like ice.”

“Popcorn?” I ask.

“That's what we call the clay-rich rock here.” Dr. Bob steps over to the steep valley side and scoops up a handful of irregular pieces of gray rock. They do look like popcorn. “When it dries out, it shrinks and forms this.” He tosses the handful up in the air. “Popcorn. Of course, the opposite happens when it rains. The clay expands and becomes so slippery, you need climbing gear for a simple slope.”

Dr. Bob points to the tarp. “Shall we go up and take a look?”

We scramble up the slope, and the students move back. The flat area is partly a natural change in slope and partly the result of some serious digging around three bumps. Two of the bumps are basketball-sized and are completely covered in white plaster. The third is about the length of a longboard and is half covered in plaster.

“Things are going well,” Dr. Bob comments.

“Yeah, man,” says one of the students, a tall skinny guy wearing a black bandanna with a skull and crossbones on it. “We'll finish plastering the top this afternoon. We've almost dug out underneath. We should be able to turn them tomorrow, and then they'll be ready to truck to the museum on Sunday.”

“We dig to find the extent of the fossil,” Dr. Bob explains. “Then we plaster the top for protection, dig underneath, flip it over and plaster the bottom. Then we can transport it back to the museum and put it on the shelves you saw earlier.”

The pirate guy takes a phone from his back pocket, steps away and takes a photo of the site. He catches me looking at him. “It's for the blog,” he says. “I post a photo every day. This is important work, and people need to know about it.”

“He's right,” Dr. Bob agrees. “These days, we have to keep up with the technology, and the more young people who know what we do, the better. It's not all
Jurassic Park
, but if we give these bones a story, it helps people relate to what we're doing.”

“What's the story here?” I ask, waving at the hillside.

“Seventy million years ago this was a coastal, swampy place, cut by rivers running into the sea over there.” Dr. Bob points east. “Our friend here”—he kneels down beside the largest lump—“was washed down one of those rivers. His or her body got stuck on a sandbank and provided a meal for some small animals. That scattered the bones around a bit, which is why we have him in three lumps. I reckon we have about fifty percent of the skeleton. We're missing the hips, back legs and tail, but we have the backbone, ribs, front legs and, most important, some of the skull.”

“What was it like?” Annabel asks.

“Hard to say. Probably something like a small ostrich, except with a long tail. This is one of the hands.” Dr. Bob leans over the partly plastered lump and points at three long bones radiating out from a jumbled collection of smaller ones. “Very delicate. Probably good for picking fruit.”

“But it's the skull that's really cool,” says the pirate guy.

“Ah, yes,” Dr. Bob says with a smile. “Captain Jack Sparrow here thinks we have a smart dinosaur.”

“The skull,” the student says, pointing at one of the basketball-sized lumps, “has eyes on the front, like we have, and a high forehead, which suggests a large brain.”

“Apparently,” Dr. Bob agrees, “but we can only see a part of it. We won't know what we're dealing with until we remove the skull from the rock. But you're right, this
was
a smart dinosaur.”

“What!” I exclaim, thinking of a book I read about intelligent dinosaurs that talked to each other, built towns and tamed other animals.

“Smart for a dinosaur,” Dr. Bob adds quickly. “Lots of them had eyes like ours on the front of their heads. It's a useful adaptation if you want to catch fast-moving prey or pick fruit off a bush. But a high forehead doesn't always mean intelligence.”

“
Pachycephalosaurus
,” Annabel says. “It has a domed head and looks smart, but the dome is just a bony lump. People used to think they head-butted, but the neck's not right. They probably used their heads to butt the flanks of their opponents, like giraffes do.”