by John Wilson
Bones
John Wilson
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2014 John Wilson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wilson, John (John Alexander), 1951-, author
Bones / John Wilson.
(Orca currents)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-0710-5 (bound).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0698-6 (pbk.).-
ISBN 978-1-4598-0699-3 (pdf).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0700-6 (epub)
I. Title. II. Series: Orca currents
PS8595.I5834B66 2014 jC813’.54 C2013-906738-8
C2013-906739-6
First published in the United States, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954152
Summary: Sam and Annabel learn about paleontology while solving a mystery.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover photography by iStockphoto.com
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Orca Book Publishers
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V8R 6S4
In the United States:
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www.orcabook.com
17 16 15 14 • 4 3 2 1
For Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
whose Lost World first sparked
my interest in dinosaurs.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Author’s Note
Chapter One
My mom meets us at the airport, wearing a poncho, a long paisley skirt and cowboy boots. Her hair is in two braids that swing wildly as she envelopes us in an enthusiastic hug. “Hi, Mom,” I say as soon as I get a chance. “This is Annabel.”
“Wonderful to meet you,” Mom says to Annabel, then looks back at me. “But you mustn’t call me Mom. That defines me by the role of mother—a role I love, but I’m more than that. You must call me Acacia. It’s a healing herb. Very good for skin ailments,” she says with a pointed look at the huge zit that has exploded on my chin. “It also cures allergies, insect bites and athletes’ foot. And the beans are delightful with guacamole.”
I stand rooted to the spot, half overwhelmed and half horribly embarrassed. Annabel isn’t fazed. “Yeah,” she says, “it’s an astringent, like tannin. Did you know there are almost a thousand different Acacia species in Australia alone?”
“Really?” Mom says, linking arms with Annabel. “I must go there one day. Aboriginal Australians have a wonderful history of using medicinal herbs. They have many more routes to healing than we do.” Any worries I had about Annabel getting on with my weird mother vanish.
Mom and Dad split up several months ago. Dad and I moved to Australia, where I met Annabel, and Mom moved to a communal farm outside Drumheller, Alberta. A couple inherited it and decided to dedicate it to alternative lifestyles. About fifteen people live there in a house and a couple of trailers, growing their own food, raising goats and chickens and making their own clothes.
The idea for a trip to visit Mom during the July school break came from Dad. The money came from Annabel’s Uncle Bill. He paid for our flights to say thanks for the part we played in getting the Loch Ard peacock back to his museum.
I was missing Mom, so I was fine with the idea. I was nervous that Annabel might not want to come, but the news that there was a dinosaur skeleton on Mom’s farm clinched Annabel’s decision to join me. The skeleton had been discovered by a local farmer in a small valley—coulee, it’s called in Alberta—and was being excavated by scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum. There was no way Annabel was going to miss out on seeing a dinosaur dig firsthand.
I follow Annabel and my mom as they traipse through the airport deep in conversation about botany and folk medicine, leaving me to drag along behind with the luggage. I’m happy that they’re getting along. It’s going to be a great holiday.
“So these are badlands,” Annabel muses out loud. We lean on our bikes, looking out over narrow steep-sided, cactus-filled valleys that go nowhere. We are at Horsethief Canyon on the Red Deer River. Dusty misshapen hills and weird spires of rock called hoodoos create a sci-fi landscape. Even on the edge of the badlands, it’s hot. I have trouble imagining what it must feel like down in those narrow valleys, sheltered from even the merest breath of wind. “Hunger Games country,” she adds.
“I wonder if there’s such a thing as goodlands?” Annabel continues. “If there is, it would be the opposite of this. There would be gently rolling hills covered in grass and fields of wheat. Maybe a few cows or sheep grazing happily in the distance between broad, shady trees.”
“Anne of Green Gables country,” I suggest, and Annabel laughs.
“I guess we should head down to the museum if we’re going to meet that scientist,” I say. Mom has arranged for us to meet Dr. Owen, the man who’s working on the dinosaur on her farm. He has agreed to show us around the museum.
We push our bikes out of the parking lot and set off along the narrow paved road toward Drumheller. The wind whistles past as we wheel over the edge of the prairie and down into the wide, flat valley bottom. We slow as the road levels out, and we pass small farms and stands of willows. I can’t imagine being happier than this, cycling along on a beautiful summer day beside Annabel. I’m trying to imagine this moment lasting forever when Annabel powers off, yells “Race you,” over her shoulder and leaves me in her dust.
I’m panting and sweating when we eventually pull in among the cars, campers and tour buses in the parking lot of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. We chain our bikes and join the tourists going through the main doors. We explain that we have an appointment with Dr. Owen and are directed through the exhibition hall to where he will meet us, beside the huge T. rex skeleton that is one of the museum’s treasures. As we wait, I stare up at the skeletal jaws lined with curved, razor-sharp teeth, some of which are as long as my hand. “He seems to be smiling,” I comment.
“What makes you think it’s a male?” Annabel asks.
“Um, he’s really big?” I suggest.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Annabel says. “There are many species where the female is considerably larger than the male. The male triplewart seadevil is a tiny stunted creature that can only live as a parasite attached to the much larger female.”
I feel like a tiny stunted creature when Annabel comes out with stuff like this. She’s not only smarter than I am, she’s smarter than everyone I know put together. “What’s a triplewart seadevil when it’s at home?”
“It’s an anglerfish. They can live in depths of six thousand feet in the ocean.”
“And how many decimal places can it recite Pi to?” I ask, teasing Annabel about her obsession with learning the endless number.
“Oh, female triplewart seadevils are known to recite Pi to over one million three
hundred thousand decimal places. Though the males can only manage five or six.”
She says this so seriously that it takes me a minute to realize I’m the one being teased. “Okay, you win, but I doubt the male T. rex was a helpless parasite.”
“Probably not,” Annabel agrees, “and this one, male or female, is impressive.”
“Actually, the female T. rex may well have been larger than the male.” We turn to see a short, bearded man wearing a shirt and pants that seem to be mostly bulging pockets. “You must be Sam and Annabel,” he says, stepping forward and holding out his hand. We shake. “I’m Dr. Robert Rawdon Mallory Filbert Owen, the museum’s director of dinosaur research, collection and exhibition,” he says with a grin. “Quite the handle, eh? I always give my full name. It seems such a shame to waste it, but everyone calls me Dr. Bob. I’m so glad your mom could set up this visit.”
His welcome is interrupted by the opening chords of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Dr. Bob looks sheepish and digs into one of his many pockets. “First thing I ever learned to play on the guitar,” he says, dragging out a cell phone and stepping away. “Excuse me.”
“Dr. Bob plays classic rock?” Annabel says, her face breaking into a broad grin. “Cool!”
“Sorry about that,” Dr. Bob says, stuffing his phone away in a pocket. “Technology is convenient, but it does make it hard to escape. Have you had a chance to visit the excavation site yet?”
“Not yet,” I say. “We were going to go down yesterday, but the rain made it too slippery.”
“Rain is unusual here in summer, and it does make moving around in the coulees difficult. We didn’t have anyone on site yesterday anyway. The team is back working at the dig today. In fact, I was planning to go down to see how things are going after I’ve finished here with you. You’re welcome to tag along.”
“Sure, thanks,” I say. I glance at Annabel, who nods. “What exactly is the skeleton that you found there?” she asks.
“Exactly?” Dr. Bob says. “That’s a tough one to answer. At first we thought it was a large ornithomimid dinosaur, because the hands were grasping and very lightly built. We even hoped for some feather impressions, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s more complex than we thought. It might even be a completely new species, though we mustn’t count our chickens before they’re hatched, eh?”
Dr. Bob and Annabel laugh out loud. I nod, not really getting the joke.
“Counting chickens?” Annabel says.
I shrug.
“The dinosaurs were birds.”
“Oh, right,” I say.
“Not strictly speaking,” Dr. Bob says, “but very closely related. Anyway, would you like a tour of our setup here?”
“Yes,” Annabel and I say at the same time.
“Excellent. Follow me.” Dr. Bob leads us over to a door marked Staff Only and ushers us through. I glance back and say a silent goodbye to the smiling T. rex.
Chapter Two
The back rooms of the Tyrrell are a different world from the areas the public sees. There are no perfectly mounted skeletons posed in front of paintings of ancient landscapes, or computer terminals where you can build your own dinosaur. There are offices, rooms cluttered with camping equipment, drills and hammers, and a large warehouse filled with steel shelving crammed with wooden boxes and white, oddly shaped packages.
“This is an exciting time in dinosaur study,” Dr. Bob explains, waving his arms around with enthusiasm. “Amazing discoveries are made every day all around the world—China, Argentina, Africa and even here in Alberta. We’re digging fossil bones out of the rock faster than we can study them. We need all this shelving to store everything until we can get around to examining it. Sometimes, that’s years.”
“But they don’t look like bones,” I say, hoping I don’t sound too stupid. “They’re mostly large white lumps.”
“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 Natur
al 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.”
