rock of ages
Today was another good day. I spent most of it on a desolate and barren hillside in the middle of a gravel quarry, hunched over a mountain of clay - and armed with only a screwdriver to sift through it - but today was still a good day. I may have burned out my brain in the hot hot sun, but I was searching for buried treasure, and I found it.
We were digging in a two million year-old sinkhole that once lay at the bottom of a Florida lake. The lake acted as a funnel to the sinkhole's drain, and the depth of that hole promoted an anoxic environment, deterring further scavenging and predation. This created conditions favorable to the preservation of a large number of whole and partially articulated skeletons. You might be surprised by the diversity of life represented in this unusual watery grave - any number of things can fall in a lake and drown over a few thousand years.
I spent the first half of the day slowly filling and then emptying bucket after bucket with the dust of ages, all while watching my peers - who sat less than three feet away from me! - unveil a series of perfect turtles, tapir legs, a few ribs, and the miscellaneous bits of a giant ground sloth. What I was doing was important - I was 'shifting dirt', and the vast majority of paleontology and archeology involves a lot of this particular task. If every poke of the shovel constitutes an experiment with the accompanying hypothesis, "is there anything down there?", then the majority of experiments in these sciences result in failure. Still, every bucket of dirt I shifted was another bucket that somebody else didn't have to - and these sciences are also about comparing the means of many many samples.
While hits may initially appear randomly distributed, they tend to cluster.
Eventually, just as I was beginning to think about heading home and working on my statistics homework, I struck paydirt.
After four or five hours of fruitless searching, you immediately recognize when your awl touches fossilized bone instead of just another lump of limestone. Every sensation is different; the sound, the shock of connection transferred up your arm, and the resistance of the bone within the clay. Even the color, once revealed, is different: at this locality, the bones have a reddish cast that is totally unlike that of the thick grey of the clay or stony white of the limestone that surrounds it. A rising "hmmm..." seems to be the "eureka" of choice among the diggers in the dirt, and each canto is followed immediately by its response from your neighbors: "any idea what you found?"
The thrill of discovery surges through you, and the heat of the afternoon and the ache of tired muscles and bent backs falls away in an instant. Your efforts are immediately redoubled, and you begin to scrape precise spalls of clay away from your source. This is as much art as science, and the careful hand of the sculptor is vital. You shave away the matrix, freeing the bone locked beneath. You do not want to disturb or damage a delicate fossil that may well turn out to be unique. Once released, the piece is bagged and tagged with a field number identifying the locality, depth, and date it was uncovered. The name of the collector is attached, and in some small way I have achieved immortality: wherever these pieces travel from here, they will also carry my name into the future of science.
If you have found one piece, you may have found another, and you never know just how much of the iceberg lies beneath the surface. You can circle around your find site, hoping to trace the line away from your single point that will lead in the direction of a miraculously complete skeleton and the incredible satisfaction of having found something that no one has seen in a very long time.
I did not unearth anything terribly spectacular: the toes of a long-dead giant armadillo, and a few scutes from its tail. The carpals of a tapir's toe.
It was still more than enough to make my whole afternoon worthwhile.