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INTRODUCTION

I was supposed to be looking for T. rex.

You'd think that the petrified bones of a flesh-rending reptile the size of a school bus wouldn't be all that difficult to find. I imagined curved ribs and smiling jaws jutting out of a stony and weathered butte as if the immense saurian had been waiting 66 million years for its moment in the sun, ready to be coaxed from the encasing stone. But searching for a dinosaur is anything but certain. A previous expedition by the same museum crew had turned up a smattering of toe bones and fossilized shards, enough to know that the "king" was in the building, but little else. Our search was left at the mercy of what erosion had wrought ever since those ancient strata were exposed by the rise of the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps there was more in the rock. Perhaps those little piggies were all that was left.

Fossil hunting will test the limits of your optimism. Every morning you wake up within the gently fluttering walls of your tent, the air already too hot at 8:00 a.m. as you scratch the scabs that were fresh bugbites yesterday afternoon. As you fill your water bags and stuff snacks into your pack, you make peace with the fact that your narrow field of human senses are probably going to miss the critical cue that will give away the prehistoric remains you've traveled so far to find.

Boots on the rock, you take one step after the next and try to remind yourself that, if you're lucky, you might literally trip over the best find of your life. Spectacular skeletons have been unearthed when someone spotted little more than a tail-bone peeking out of the dirt, and more than one expert has washed away the rime of obscuring stone by taking a piss. If only you might be so lucky. There are no game trails to follow or recent scat from which a prehistoric organism's where-abouts might be drawn out. The ancient remains hold still, preserved and confined in the stone, somehow harder to find than a living animal that can flap, hop, run, crawl, or swim away from you. All you can do is learn to love the search, using the fact that no one else seems to be finding much, either, as an emotional salve.

I knew all this, but still I wanted to hope. I told myself that I'd even settle for a broken and isolated tooth, what remained of a serrated, biological ice pick the size of a banana. An adult Tyrannosaurus had about sixty teeth in their mouth at any one time, after all, and the fearsome reptiles automatically replaced their old teeth with fresh choppers throughout their lives. Finding one that had slipped from its socket to be buried in the gray hillside didn't seem like an unreasonable request. Under the Montana sky, a dark curtain of clouds gradually burned away to reveal an endless, inverted sea of blue. I walked, poked at potential fossils, turned over rocks, and hoped to spot some unusual color or texture out of the corner of my eye that would signal the rock before me wasn't what it seemed. Over time, however, I had begun to feel like I was most skilled at finding where the tyrannosaur was not, narrowing the field of possibilities for where a four-foot femur or a dentary dotted with teeth might be hiding. And the team had other places to visit. Looking for dinosaurs on public lands requires specially arranged permits, patches of rock sometimes hours away from each other across the parched splay of western desert. Time was running out.

When you're looking at a slope where a dinosaur might be tucked snug into the stone, the most logical thing to do is start at the bottom. Walk slowly and carefully along the base of the incline, paying special attention to any washes and arroyos for isolated bones or even fossil fragments that might give away the presence of something better. If you're fortunate, you can follow the trail of petrified bread crumbs up to their source. And if the sun is at the right angle, the Earth is the correct distance from Mars, the wind is just at the proper speed, or whatever it is that determines luck, the osteological hash will lead you to a lovely leg bone jutting out of a cliff or a string of barely eroded vertebrae still in place.

I was not lucky. Textbook procedure had entirely let me down, and so I decided to break the rules and find a way up the slope to a shelf of resilient stone the color of dried blood jutting out at the very top of the section. Fossils found in such rock are rarely pretty, sometimes only coming down as impressions of bones that have eroded away rather than the animal's remains themselves, but that would be better than nothing. I clambered to the lip of the ancient stone above the slope, considering whether the sky really did seem bigger in Montana than elsewhere, as I pried the sharp end of my rock hammer into the stone to lever up a stony sliver in frustration. "Come on, girl, where are you hiding?" I murmured to myself.

 

When the sheet of Cretaceous sandstone popped and flipped, there was a leaf just below it.

For a moment, I thought I had made a mistake. The leaf looked almost new, as if it had just recently wafted down on a late summer breeze and slipped under the sedimentary layers. I could see everything down to the tiny, branching veins that spread toward the leaf's multiple points. It didn't look all that different from the maple leaves that collected along the curb every autumn of my East Coast childhood.