Fossils Day

For Fossils Day here is an excerpt from Fossils A Dorchester Sisters Novel written by M. G. Lorraine:

George, Doris, and Kileah arrived at a grass-covered, windblown, sagebrush-strewn ridge, which dropped to a semiarid riverbed at the bottom of a gullied wash about forty-five feet high. A single tree stood in the area, a pinion pine, with age as its biggest asset. It was currently a backdrop to the camp and their only shade, which they hadn’t brought with them. But George was glowing.

“Where are we, George? It’s beautiful!” Kileah asked.

“About twenty-five minutes outside of Elyria, population fifty-one, and next to a very old streambed,” was his response as he helped Doris unpack their vehicle. The wash had cut into the eons, propelling the rock ledges and cliff sides back in time. The river flowed across the fields and fell over the ridge with a gorgeous waterfall. Trickling now, but the cut of the ledge and the exposed creek bed below told of days when it was full and falling in torrents. George happened upon it when he had taken Doris four-wheeling on the recently acquired acreage. It was then that they had stumbled into this great little plateau and the amazing creek-cut valley.

The plateau continued upward to the rock cleft and the new plateau above. It was all covered in grass, summer flowers, sage, and scrub brush. The river meandered over the field, occasionally with a beaver dam creating larger pools. You could listen to the waterfall and the soft sounds as it echoed across the prairie. It was clear by how the river ran beside the bend of the ridge that, for millennia, it had been ebbing and flowing in this location. Sometimes it was a trickle in the hot, dry heat of summer, but during a cloudburst, the rain could transform into a gully-washer flash flood.

It was on the level plain near the turn in the river as it opened again onto the flat steppe, showing the expanse from the creek to the game trail George took Kileah. Still standing was his walking stick and kerchief. George glowed as he realized Kileah had already visually found the marker.

Doris got out of the car and started making herself at home. Out came a large sand umbrella, table, chairs, and coolers. In no more than five minutes, she had changed this grassy plateau into a comfortable place to read. Out came a beautiful leather-bound edition of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, and Kileah saw her smile. “I had to bring something to keep me occupied until dinner.”

“Come, Kileah, let me show you where I found my treasure,” George Meeker said with a huge smile; the sense of anticipation emanating from him was electric. Well, maybe the sense of anticipation wasn’t all emanating from George. Kileah had plenty of it herself. It charged the air. Time to go. The moment of truth had come. The time had come to start answering the question: would this be a great site or not? It was time to find out.

They had walked a few yards when Kileah started looking at the ground. More fragments and fossils, a couple of claw fragments, some very small beak bits, and an egg fragment. When she first saw it, she was unsure what she had seen. She had gotten out her tools and started looking at a small rise near a beak bit. She had seen the rise. To an inexperienced eye, it would have looked like a dirt clod. But Kileah’s strength was in her knowledge and instincts. She used them both.

Since her first summer dig during her freshman year of college, she had been credited with great instincts. She had been digging in the remote section of an old Sauropod dig when she came across a small bone fragment. No one else had thought it was anything special, but she was young and new, and she was asked to be allowed to continue digging into another section. She had been given permission, but nobody expected her to find anything. In fact, they had figured to close the dig as she finished. On her second day in the new section, she had uncovered a large toe, then another, then a huge femur, and finally, she had taken an old site and turned it into a new project containing a nearly complete Diplodocus, which would have weighed nearly thirteen tons.

She had dug the next summer on another site and found something new again. Her instincts had found success. Now, other dig leaders trusted them. She had been given more latitude than most young professors to explore, and each time, remarkably, she had been successful.

“Lunch!” Doris called Kileah and George. She knew from experience that if she didn’t call them, they would forget eating and be in the ravine until it was too dark to see.

George and Kileah emerged from the rim of the ravine with excitement emanating from their faces. “Did you see the toe I found?” Kileah said, her face glowing with excitement. “I can’t believe the number of fragments in the open.” She had found two more fossilized fragments, one of which she was sure was a toe. The geology of this particular area was fabulous. The K-T boundary line was clearly exposed, and the stream flowing there had opened the Late Cretaceous period to exploration. Her instincts told her this would be a great dig.

“I did see it! Did you see the fragments I photographed? I am not moving or touching anything until you have seen and noted them, but I can barely keep myself from picking up and touching everything,” George continued as he took the bottle of water and wipes, then cleaned his hands as he offered Kileah the same resources. “Kileah, what are you thinking? Do you think we have something worth exploring?”

“I do, but now the hard part will begin…,” Kileah said as she started explaining the process from here. She had to note the exact find and take her things back to the lab. She would turn in her report and then wait while all the decisions were made about this location and the possibilities.

The waiting had been hard, really hard. The Meeker’s had called periodically as other university professors had gone out to assess the options. Then, finally, word came that a full excavation would be funded for the following summer. She had applied to lead the team, but she had many doubts about whether she would be chosen as leader.

Until Next Time,