Jurassic Heart (3 page)

“Excuse me?”

“Name it,” I said. “Take pride in your work. You found this animal. You are the reason the world will know it existed. Tell me what its name is.”

Brad laughed and looked at the photos again. “Mavis,” he said.

“Good choice,” I said, smiling. “Mavis works for me. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Dr. Eisenberg.”

I rolled my eyes and gave up on him. After my morning meeting with Brad, I’d set up outside with an amateur digger called Nancy; she and her husband, Chuck, had gotten into paleontology after taking a community college class together when they’d retired. Nancy was observant, and I got the impression she was very intelligent. She kept meticulous notes and frequently asked me to repeat something so she had time to write it down.

Work was slow going, but I relished the opportunity to sit outside in the dirt, even if I was only vaguely supervising. Nancy kept up a constant stream of chatter that I only partly listened to as she gently dug through the dirt. Her words blended into the noise from the rest of the dig: the sound of shovels and radios and someone whistling.

Something nostalgic tugged at my belly. I’d missed this.

Nancy had picked a spot close to the edge of the tree line and was battling with tree roots as well as the usual rocks and dirt. I had gravitated to the short, compact, gray-haired woman after wandering down to the dig, admiring her focus on her work.

Eric rocked up to the site around ten, by which time I’d spent a few hours with the rest of the team out on the site. He sauntered up to the trailer that served as base of operations, looked in, then came straight back out again with a disgusted expression. I could only guess at what had upset him: all of his team were out doing actual work.

“Give me a minute, Nancy,” I said after watching Eric scan the site.

I stood, brushing the dirt off my hands onto my knees, then walked casually over to Eric.

“Eisenberg,” he said with a nod, not offering to shake hands.

“Eric,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

“I got the impression Sam sent you out here to identify some bones, not to play teacher to my team.”

I shrugged. “I’ve already identified your remains,” I said lightly. “Although I’d like permission to study them in person, to verify my theory. I needed you to agree to that before I could move on, and Nancy asked for my help. I’m not here to tread on your toes, Eric.”

“Good,” he said sharply. “Why can’t you tell me about the raptor now? A simple yes or no is good enough for me.”

He was wearing designer jeans and brand-new boots—designer jeans for a job that required him to crawl around in the mud and dirt. My patience started to wear thin.

“I can tell you it’s not a raptor,” I said with a touch of irritation. “It’s a good find, and with a bit of luck Brad could uncover the rest of the skeleton. But it’s not a raptor.”

Eric sneered at me and paced a few steps away, then a few steps back. “What do you know?” he demanded, poking a finger at my chest. “They should have sent Miriam. She knows what she’s talking about.”

“I’m happy to send the photographs to Miriam for a second opinion,” I told him, “but that’s not really necessary. She will only verify what I’ve just told you. If I could handle the bones myself, I may be able to give you a better idea of what it
is
rather than just confirming what it isn’t.”

“Fine, whatever,” he said, waving my words away. “Go look at them. I’ll call the vet, tell him you’re on your way. And send those photos to Miriam. I want that second opinion.”

“I
HATE
this guy,” I ranted to Miriam as I paced the room in my motel. “Like, I really fucking hate him.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You don’t get it!” I exclaimed. “He’s got these kids out digging for him, kids who are working for nothing because they’re first-year undergrads, for fuck’s sake, and they don’t know enough about the business to know what belongs to them and what they have to hand over to him.”

“It is his dig, Nick,” she said gently.

“I know, that’s the most fucked-up part of it,” I said. “He’s funding the dig so he gets to reap the rewards. But he’s not even doing any of the work.”

“It’s probably a good thing he’s not out there digging,” she said. “He’d do more damage than good.”

“He gets them all to call him Mr. White.”

“That’s because he’s an asshole.”

I rolled my eyes and huffed a reluctant laugh.

“So, is it a raptor?”

“Of course it’s not a fucking raptor. But to add insult to injury, he wants you to verify. I’m uploading the photos now, and then I’ll send them over to you.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. What a dick. So when’s your flight out of there?”

I hesitated, apparently long enough for her to sense it.

“What?” she demanded.

“There’s bite marks on the bones,” I said hesitantly. “They’re definitely predator bites, premortem.”

“Ah, shit,” she muttered. “Don’t do it, Nick.”

“Just for a few days,” I said. “I want to have a look round. See what’s going on. If there are raptor bites, then that means there must be raptors around here somewhere.”

“You’ve been on this wild-goose chase before,” she warned me, not that I needed warning.

Mim was one of my closest friends in the paleontology community. I’d worked for her on my very first professional dig, way out in the middle of nowhere in Mongolia. She was probably the most famous female paleontologist of all time, having discovered new sites where several complete skeletons of large carnivorous dinosaurs had been found. Everything I’d ever learned about predators came from Mim.

For the first two seasons, I’d worked under her as her assistant. Then, the next year, I was her partner, and in the last year we worked in Mongolia, I led the dig and she consulted. On that dig, she’d told me where to go: a conservative choice of site not far from where she’d made big discoveries in the past. But I didn’t want to follow on the coattails of her success. I’d wanted to branch out, find new sites, and make my mark there.

I’d failed. Horribly.

A month into the dig after finding exactly zilch, we moved to the area Mim had suggested in the first place and proceeded to find a complete Saurornithoides skeleton. It was a huge discovery for me. And a bigger lesson. “Listen to Miriam” became my personal mantra. I’d considered getting it tattooed on me, but she’d asked me nicely not to.

“Three days, Mim,” I said to her. “If we haven’t got anything in the next three days, then I swear to God, I’ll leave Eric fucking White here with his poor undergrads to dig up not-Velociraptors to his heart’s content.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Look after yourself, though, Nick. He’ll stomp all over you to get his way.”

“I know,” I assured her. “Love you.”

“Love you too. Bye.”

I sat down with the information Brad had photocopied for me, intent on studying every last thing before heading back to the site in the morning. I was going to go in there armed to the back teeth with every bit of information I could get my hands on. And I was going to find myself a fucking raptor.

T
HE
NEXT
day I went down to the veterinary office, where a pleasant young woman met me and led me through to their cold storage unit.

“This is so exciting,” she said. “We’ve never had dinosaur bones in the office before.”

“That’s probably because cold storage isn’t really the best place for them,” I said. “Cold can make the bones brittle and more likely to be damaged.”

Her face fell. “Oh.”

“It’s not your fault,” I assured her. “If you’ve got any space, I can move them to somewhere more appropriate.”

“Sure, I guess… the operating storage room is all the space we’ve got, really.”

“That sounds just great. Thanks for your help.”

She left me alone after showing me into the storage room. It took a while to unwrap the delicate layers of fabric from the fossils, and I was pleased to see the care Brad had obviously taken not only when excavating the bones but afterward too, making sure they were well preserved.

I couldn’t go any further with my analysis of what the animal was, so sending the bones off to a lab for proper authentication was probably the best course of action. Still, what interested me were the bite marks, if that was what they were, and checking the type of damage against the database of knowledge I had available to me.

I found my camera and angled the operating light to get the best possible photos, knowing I might not get this opportunity again if Eric had another tantrum and decided I wasn’t welcome anymore. Fortunately, the process of photographing and logging was familiar to me, and I worked methodically, taking measurements and recording two sets of notes, one for myself and another for the lab.

With no computer or reference books with me, I was forced to use my phone and good old Google to check some of the details. All clues pointed toward the bones belonging to an Othnielosaurus, and what I’d told Eric was still true—if Brad could dig up the rest of the skeleton, it would be a great find.

Once I had all the information I needed, I carefully rewrapped the big chunks of rock that held the bones and transferred them to a room-temperature storage room, out of the cooler. I nodded my thanks to the assistant as I left. Even though I wouldn’t return to the dig site that day, I got the impression there was plenty of work for me to do back in my motel room.

T
HE
NEXT
day, I again arrived at the park early, hoping to talk to Eric’s team without him around. Unfortunately, he was there too. From the way he was acting, I got the impression the last thing he wanted was me talking to any of them.

“Did you hear from Mim yet?” I asked Eric, feigning ignorance on the matter even though I’d been bcc’d into the e-mail she’d sent the day before.

“Yes,” he said primly. “She has suggested a laboratory where I can send the bones for verification and preparation for display.”

“Good,” I said. That was only the very last part of the message. She’d told him in no uncertain terms he didn’t know what he was doing, and he should send the find to someone who could take proper care of the fossils.
Then
she’d suggested the name of a good lab.

“I’d like to stick around for a few days, if it’s all the same to you,” I continued, watching Eric’s face closely for any flicker of emotion. “Your team is doing good work, and I’m interested in seeing if Brad can locate the rest of that specimen.”

He looked, for a moment, like he was about to refuse, just because he could.

“Fine,” he said eventually. “Don’t get in the way of my team, though. And if you’re going to dig, you can log everything with base camp at the trailer.”

What he was telling me, in no uncertain terms, was that anything I found, he would take credit for. Whatever.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

My usual way of working was to set up either smack bam in the middle of the dig so I could work outward, or right on the most interesting-looking edge. The dig here had already been in full swing for a few weeks, so most of the hard work to take off the layers of topsoil and digging the trenches had already been done with the big machines. The paleontologists, both student and amateur, were working on the more delicate details of sifting through the dirt for little fossils, chemically testing the soil, and excavating the next layer down. Like Brad, some people had already made discoveries that were fantastic, both for the dig and individual successes.

As an outsider, and as someone who had been on (and led) a fair number of digs, I could see the edges of disorder and poor organization creeping into the way people worked. It was fair enough if Eric didn’t want to get his hands dirty and do the actual digging himself, although he was more than capable of doing it if he really wanted to. But if he was supposed to be the leader, he needed to get his team fixed.

From what I’d learned during my quick scan of the walls in the lab trailer, I guessed the system that had been set up was the work of several people. The boundaries of the dig and the grid references within it weren’t clearly defined, meaning people weren’t sure where their area ended and another one began. It looked like some areas were being worked multiple times while others got ignored. It was a classic symptom of “chase the ball”—someone would find something interesting, and the whole team would flock to that area to see if they could find something too. The communication between the different clusters of people was bad. No one was sharing their failures, only the successes. That kind of discordance meant my initial impression was right—some areas
were
being overworked, and parts of the dig that had a lot of potential ended up ignored.

It was not my responsibility to force Eric’s troops into line, though.

I picked a corner—the opposite side of the site to the tree line, after seeing how much trouble Nancy was having with the tree roots. Plus, any big finds in that area would require taking out trees that were several hundred years old, and that didn’t sit well with me. If there was anything hiding under there, it would need to stay hidden, for a little while longer at least.

With my own kit still at my mom’s house (if I decided to stay, I’d need to go collect it), I’d borrowed some basic tools from the other diggers so I could start work immediately.

On my knees in the cool mud, with the familiar scents and sounds of my work around me, I was forcibly reminded of just what I’d missed while working in one of the greatest museums in the world. It had been an honor to spend time in London, but in that moment, there wasn’t anywhere else I’d have rather been.