The bone wars, p.1
The Bone Wars, page 1
The
Bone Wars
A novel
Erin Evan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2023 Erin Evan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California
www.inkshares.com
Edited by Adam Gomolin
Cover design by M.S. Corley
Interior design by Kevin G. Summers
ISBN: 9781942645665
e-ISBN: 9781942645672
LCCN: 2017955470
First edition
Printed in the United States of America
Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.
—Arthur C. Clarke
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world.
Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
—Rollo May
For my mother.
As usual, you were right.
And for my father.
See, Mom was right.
Contents
Rocks, Pebbles, Sand
Plaster of Pachy
Dino Damage
Give It Your Awl
Cretaceous Salad
Thunder Bumper
There’s a Monster Under My Bedrock
Creature Features
Something New
Game of Thrones Isn’t Real History
Raid
Lost in Montana
A Last-Ditch Effort
Owen’s Truth
London Calling
Night at the Museum
Office Hours
Escape from the Museum
The Worst Idea Ever
Some Famous Influential Movie
Youth in All its glory
The Basement in Lyme Regis
Seneca’s Wise Words
The Footsteps of Fafnir
Buried History
The Italian Job
Inside the Tumulus
The Fate of Cornelius Meyer
The Devil You Know
Betrayal
All Fall Down
The Tale of Nakasogi
The Hard Truth
The Room
Afterword
Rocks, Pebbles, Sand
Molly
For as long as I could remember, all I ever wanted to do was dig in the dirt. To look for treasure.
Sure, I did other normal kid stuff. I’d play hopscotch or swing on the monkey bars. Ride my bike with my friends. Binge Netflix. But as soon as I could get away and be alone, I’d find myself at a park, poking and kicking at the soils to get to the layers of stone underneath. Once exposed, I’d carefully break apart the layers, looking. Always looking.
Eventually I’d find something. I always found something. Rocks, no matter how broken, tell a story. If it was small, I’d bag it and take it home for my collection. If it wasn’t small, I’d end up digging until dark, dreaming about the day I’d find real treasure.
My dad realized I had a passion and wanted to nurture it. At dinner parties, he’d parade me about, proudly noting that his four-year-old was still into her “dirty habit.” It was an inside joke that horrified adults who had no sense of humor.
My mother was less understanding. I knew she only wanted the best for me. “Look up, Molly!” she’d say. “You’re missing the world.”
Yet my eyes never left the ground.
The day I left for Montana was no different. I leaned my head against the plane’s window and squinted down at the ground. I couldn’t see any small rocks, but I could see Glasgow, Montana. It was a gray-and-black sprawl dotting a brown-and-yellow landscape of small hills and grasslands. The town felt slow, even from a thousand feet in the air. I bet people waved when you passed, hosted potlucks on the weekends after the big high school football game, and went to church in their Sunday best.
I closed my eyes and leaned back in my seat, my fingers toying with the gold ring on my leather necklace. Five hundred years ago, Glasgow didn’t exist. It was a vast, grassy prairie punctuated by Indigenous settlements and vast swaths of buffalo and pronghorn antelope.
Ten thousand years before that, this land was on the outer edge of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet. It was a cold, harsh world for the humans who survived on fifteen-foot-tall mammoths that they hunted with nothing but stone-tipped spears and guts of steel.
Sixty-six million years before that, this land was near the coast of the enormous Western Interior Seaway, a vast body of ocean water that cut right through North America. Dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex hunted in its forests and open areas for dinner while small mammals—including our ancestors—hid in terror at the possibility of being on the menu. Eventually these animals died, either by bad luck or old age, and some were buried under mud, silt, and sand. Their fleshy parts decomposed, leaving their bones behind.
Over time, those bones were slowly replaced with minerals. Petrified into immortality. Transformed into the real treasure. A treasure that was often hiding in plain sight, and could be overlooked if you didn’t know what you were looking for. It was the kind of treasure that people kill for.
Fossils.
Those of the dinosaur ilk, more precisely.
Okay, I don’t know for sure if anyone has actually murdered for dinosaur fossils. But I do know that plenty of people have gotten hurt looking for them. While the hunt was thrilling, for me, it was really about something else. Something deeper. For me, it was the endgame of finding that new, revolutionary fossil. An ancient truth hidden right under our feet.
I was going to Montana to hunt that treasure.
It was easy to see why so many people were obsessed with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were one of the most successful animals to ever live on earth. The first dinosaurs appeared roughly 230 million years ago and the last ones died sixty-six million years ago. They basically ruled the planet for over 164 million years. Think about it. 164 million years. The first Homo sapiens— modern humans—only appeared three hundred thousand years ago. The age of the dinosaurs was called the Mesozoic era, and it was broken into three distinct periods: the Triassic, the Jurassic, and then the Cretaceous. The whole Mesozoic was so long that some of the best-known dinosaurs never even saw one another. For example, the famous bony-plated Stegosaurus thrived in the Jurassic period about 150 million years ago. However, Tyrannosaurus rex lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, about sixty-six million years ago. There were fifty million to one hundred million years between these two incredibly famous dinosaurs. Not once did they ever see each other, let alone fight, contrary to the whims of every single child who owned a dinosaur toy set.
Scientists have found about seven hundred dinosaur species in the fossil record so far, but considering their lifetime on the planet and the fact that their distant cousin, the modern bird, currently stood at about eighteen thousand species, I thought it safe to say we were still missing a lot.
I smiled as I stretched my body, moving my cramped legs as best as I could, sore from all my traveling over the past few hours. That would change soon. I’d be digging for dinosaurs.
“How are you doing, young lady? We’re running a bit late,” an overly caffeinated voice chirped near me. I turned to look at the air steward, the only other passenger on my flight. She was tall and blond. So blond. “But we’ll be landing soon.” She pointed a perfectly manicured nail toward my window. “Probably a cow delay.”
Okay, I’d bite.
“Cow delay?”
She nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes. Old Mike Spencer’s ranch shares a fence line with the airport. He’s terrible at keeping it up. His cows get on the tarmac now and then.”
Definitely not like home.
I gave her a shrug and reached down to grab my headphones from my backpack. I plugged them into my phone and brought up Dr. Sean Oliphant’s TED Talk. Soon, Oliphant’s familiar clipped speech filled my ears.
“Imagine a world millions of years ago that looks almost exactly like this one. Can you do it? Just try.” Oliphant laughed gently, his tone cheerful as he walked across a brightly lit stage. He was wearing a crisp white button-down with a navy suit jacket and beige slacks. The uniform of the Television Scientist. After giving the audience another encouraging smile, he waved his arms out toward them. On cue, the camera turned to the front row. All eyes were on this man. I didn’t blame them.
“I bet you can. Geologists call this idea the Law of Uniformitarianism. It’s the idea that what’s happening today, at least in terms of geologic processes, is what occurred in the past. Not much in that respect has changed. There was the sun. There was rain that fell from the sky, eroding the land. There was snow and ice. Floods, droughts. Landslides, earthquakes. The world operated the exact same way. And there was life. Many animals were familiar looking. Four-legged creatures that ambled about the world, like amphibians and lizards. Fish and clams in the oceans. And insects like the amazing cockroach.” I heard a few chuckles mix ed with disgusted titters in the background. “No, I’m serious.” Oliphant grinned. “The amazing cockroach. Arguably the most successful animal in earth’s history. Laugh all you want. It evolved about three hundred million years ago and lived through multiple extinction events. It’s still going strong, especially in my kitchen.” Oliphant gave the audience a knowing smile, and there was another round of laughter.
“But, while all this feels and looks familiar, the world was fantastically different in a significant way. It was filled with our ancestors. Precursors to our modern animals. For example, this guy.” Oliphant clicked a small remote. Behind him, the screen lit up with a picture of a long, four-legged creature. It had a bulky head filled with sharp teeth and a long tail. But its most distinctive feature was the spiny sail protruding from its back. “For millions of years, Dimetrodon wandered forests, eating smaller prey. This prehistoric reptile was a giant of the land; it was the length of a small car.”
Click.
Another picture, and the familiar shape of a flying Pteranodon filled the screen, its body and beaked skull tiny in comparison to its massive wings. “Fast forward millions of years, and reptiles were not only on the land, but also in the skies and oceans. They evolved into flying Pteranodons.”
Click.
“Or swimming plesiosaurs. An oddity in the ocean, the giant plesiosaurs had a bulky body, flippers, and a long neck, perfect for streaking through the sea to catch fish.”
Oliphant took a deep breath and walked along the stage. Behind him, a picture of a Tyrannosaurus rex filled the screen. “But the strangest, in my opinion, was this diverse class of animals. I’m talking, of course, of the dinosaur.” He pointed at the screen behind him. “That crazy reptile relative! How dare it not conform to the standards of the day? How dare it not be a slow, lumbering reptile, like a good Mesozoic crocodile or lizard! No. It was like that city cousin we all seem to have who has tons of piercings and tattoos and works in a coffee shop spouting poetry and man-buns while slinging espresso.”
He paused and looked around the room, a slight smile on his face as the audience chuckled.
He continued, “The crazy dinosaur decided to be different. What did it do? Well, it decided to evolve their legs under their body. What fantastic posture. So very different from the lumbering sprawling leg and hip arrangement their country bumpkin cousins had, and still have today. Take a look at a modern lizard. They have only side-to-side motion when they walk or run. It was the same back then. But not dinosaurs. No, no. They evolved into something new. Then, those crazy dinosaurs, well, they just had to diversify to take advantage of their faster hip setup. Fill in some niches and exploit new food opportunities. And boy did they do that. Some ate meat. Some ate plants. Some did both. Because of this, they evolved into a diverse group of animals. Some had scales, some feathers. Some were as tiny as a dog. Some were as giant as a redwood. Some walked on two legs, others four. Some were real rebels and went back and forth between the two. And they have captured our imagination for the entirety of the insignificant time that Homo sapiens has been around, digging them up, putting them back together, categorizing them, bringing them to life in books and films.
“As many of you are well aware, I’m a vertebrate paleontologist with a focus on dinosaurs. I dig in the ground because I truly believe it’s critical to learn about our past. We learn from our past to strengthen our future, to be better people. Even if dinosaurs are as far from humans as can be, they still had a lot of relatable similarities. Some lived alone, others in groups, for example. Through my research at Nest Valley in Montana, I was able to prove the complex social structures of dinosaurs, dinosaurs people assumed were lumbering, solitary idiots. In actuality, they laid their eggs, raised their young, and juveniles lived nearby, relying on the old adage of strength in numbers to survive predators. We know a lot. This is especially impressive considering academic paleontology is really only one hundred and fifty years old—”
Just then, I heard a rumbling noise over my headphones, and felt the plane shift. I stopped the video and removed my headphones in time to hear the pilot’s crackling voice echoing through the cabin, giving us some sort of direction. But it was hard to make out over the whine of the engines.
“I guess the cows moved,” I said to the air steward.
I felt a rush of cool air hit my face as I walked through the entry door to the airport terminal. The terminal turned out to be a small, empty room with dingy carpet and several unoccupied desks.
An email from Nakasogi Industries said I’d won their prize to fund my internship, and a second email from my crew boss, Sarah Connell, told me to be at Glasgow Airport on that date and at that time. So there I was. By myself, apparently.
While I waited for Sarah to arrive, I opened my small backpack to double-check I had everything I might need for the day, just in case we went right to the dig from the airport. I paused at the worn children’s book near the top. I touched its cover and spine with my fingers, tracing the title’s familiar angles and ridges.
Dragons of the World.
The front door swung open, and I jerked my head up. A tall man in a dusty T-shirt, canvas pants, and heavy boots strode into the room. His face was square and his sunburned cheeks were covered with gray stubble.
The classic field look. This was probably my ride.
“Hi,” I said with a small wave.
Gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses hid his eyes, but I could tell that he was boring holes right into me. He stopped and stared down at me for a few seconds. Man, he was really tall.
“You’re the kid who’s working on our dig this summer?” he finally asked.
“Yeah, but I’m no kid.”
“Sure you’re not,” he said. “What are you, eleven?”
“I’m sixteen!”
He groaned. “I thought Nakasogi Industries was sending us someone with experience.”
“I’ve got two years of field experience and four years of museum—”
“That’s two years not enough,” he said.
Who the hell did this guy think he was?
Before I could say anything, the man snorted. “Okay, kid, don’t get your hackles up.” He reached down and swung my larger backpack over his shoulder. He glared at me over the rim of his sunglasses. “This it?”
“Um, yeah.” I shrugged the smaller backpack onto my back.
He turned and headed for the exit.
“Wait! Where’s Sarah Connell?”
“At the site. Let’s get moving before the jackalopes eat her alive.”
What a charmer.
Plaster of Pachy
Farnsworth
Heat and dust hit my face as I banged open the terminal door. Welcome to Glasgow, Montana. A large dust devil whirled around just beyond the boundary of the airport, lifting debris from the rocky terrain.
Kids don’t belong on digs. Especially an inexperienced West Coaster. She’ll probably force me to stop at an organic farmers market to look for vegan soy burgers for lunch.
The rubber of her boots squeaked as she ran to catch up to me. Probably fresh out of the box.
After a few steps, I glanced behind me. She was a small, slight thing, barely filling out her jeans and T-shirt. She had a heart-shaped face and wide, green eyes. Her dark brown hair was tied behind her head in a ponytail that swung back and forth as she ran to keep up.
“At least you’re dressed like a paleontologist,” I said.
She stopped and looked down. “What else would I be wearing?”
“You’d be surprised.” I tossed the girl’s larger black backpack into the truck bed. It hit with a loud thud.
The girl’s head jerked up. “Hey, watch it! That’s my stuff.” She frowned, a teenager’s edge to her tone.
What was her name again? Sarah told me, but I wasn’t listening. I’d polished off too many beers at Murphy’s last night, and Sarah knew how and when to strike.
I looked hard at the girl before opening the driver’s side door.
“It’s fine,” I said.
She stood on her toes and peered into the truck bed for the pack.
“Those are fossils,” she said. She pointed to several round white blobs in the truck bed. Her voice was high, and her face was glowing red. “You just leave fossils in your truck while you go pick up people at the airport? Aren’t you afraid of somebody damaging them, or stealing them?”
