grassland finds

I filled three sheets of paper from a hotel notepad writing down the route numbers I needed to wind my way to northeast Nebraska. I thought it would be easier than squinting at screen grabs on my phone or fiddling with the road atlas at 65 mph, but I ended up doing both of those things as well. Some places worth seeing are still difficult to find, despite social media’s efforts to turn obscure natural treasures and historical sites into can’t-miss commodities. But there’s no way to stop an epidemic after everyone’s caught the bug. Our world’s mapped out, and pretty soon driving itself will become obsolete. We’ll plug in the coordinates, and Elon Musk will whisk us away.

Thinking about the future can get a bit depressing. One thing a map can’t tell you is how to navigate your way out of the doldrums. Sometimes you can only just sit there for a while until a breeze picks up. Friday morning’s breeze was my trip “just in time” to a state park, which closes for the season next week. I chose the place based on a brief glance at its website, and I wrote from California to make sure it would be open. I deliberately didn’t look too closely at what kind of fossils I’d be seeing after the ranger let me know the lights would still be on. Two school buses were parked on the far end of the lot when I arrived three weeks later, and a few dozen students were milling about, so I almost spun around and headed on to Iowa. But instead of turning all avian dinosaur again, I parked and paid the 15 bucks and killed time checking out trees and sculptures outside the visitor center. The kids left about half an hour later, and I followed a walkway downhill toward a large structure beside empty gray patches on the ground. A placard indicated that National Geographic had dug up bones from those patches in 1977 and ‘78, and red flags marked the spots in what I considered a rather lackadaisical fashion. One might see similar flags sticking out of the ground above a buried utility line. A slightly larger yellow one, just as nondescript, indicated the first discovery more than 40 decades ago of the skull — and later entire skeleton — of a 12-million-year-old rhinoceros.

In Utah a few days ago I felt underwhelmed by the sight of multiple dinosaurs stacked from floor to ceiling embedded in the mountain rock. Maybe the number of people, the grayness and the heat outside conspired to flatten my reaction to what is akin to the mother lode of fossil discoveries. But once inside the door at the Nebraska site I felt much more engaged. Paleontologists from a university are unearthing an entire herd of rhinoceroses lost to the fallen ash of a distant volcano, along with other animals that essentially starved and suffocated because of that event so long ago. I spoke to a student at work painstakingly removing the ash from an early horse, and I asked her if she found the work gratifying. “There’s nothing better,” she said. She was barefoot in order to avoid stepping on the delicate excavations, and I asked her about the ash. “It’s glass, but it’s soft,” she said. “Daniel has a jar. He can let you see what it feels like.” Just then, a tall, gangly young man with an adam’s apple like a walnut walked up. “Here’s Daniel now,” I said. “How do you know my name?” “Well,” I said, “she just mentioned you, and it’s on your name tag.” That seemed to placate him, but I didn’t quite yet feel that I’d established myself as the dominant weirdo, so later, after touching “using two fingertips” the smooth but gritty ash in the jar, I asked him if I had to give back the stuff that stuck to my skin, and later still I asked if he ever feels sorry for the rhinoceroses even though it’s been a while since they died. That put me on top.

I myself kind of did feel sorry for those rhinos. Daniel pointed out a mother and her “baby,” the parent curled around her child as they died. A few dozen or so other animals were marked with numbers throughout the ashy gravesite, half exposed to gawkers like me. That’s the thing about animal fossils, no matter the epoch. All we really know about these creatures is the contour of their bones and the traces they left while alive. We know little of their flesh, and about their lives we can only speculate, our guesses based not on direct observation but on the hypothesis that, despite the difference of millions of years, their world and ours have things in common. I guess thinking about the past can get a bit depressing, too.