Project Orpheus: A Tale of Blood and Feathers

Chapter 6: The Paleontologist

The process of digging up dead things was slow, arduous, meticulous and insanely precise. It required a strong but delicate hand. A stray strike could ruin data that would never again be found in the fossil record. It didn't help that often, the process of excavating things like this was destructive to the actual elements just by exposing them to the world - though that was more of an archeology thing.

Still, there was a story in the dirt, and for Anise Peralta, there was nothing more exciting than carving it out so someone else could read what was in the pages.

And in front of her, there wasn't just a page, or a chapter, but perhaps an entire book.

Anise was good at identifying bones, and identifying what those bones belonged to. The specimen she was currently excavating was a Deinocherius (or something very similar, she couldn't be sure exactly which one until she uncovered more of it). She had been impressively lucky to find this specimen. Ground sonar scans indicated that it was at least 90% intact, perhaps more. The machine they had didn't have the best resolution, but it was enough for a general picture - which was all she needed anyway.

They had dug down far enough with the pick-axe by now that bone was visible, and the hard part began - carefully chiseling away at the rock to release the bone from the rock, piece by piece.

Anise found the Ground Sonar really useful, but she admitted she missed the revelatory experience of a fresh find. You see a little bit of bone sticking out of the ground, and start to clear your way around it. It's a little rounded, so maybe it's a skull. But once you clear away enough of the material around it you find that no, it's actually long and thin, not round. Maybe it's a femur. But as you clear away more dirt, it starts to twist in another direction and fan out, so it must be a rib. Piece by piece it goes until the whole of the fossil is liberated, each little bit of it revealed giving you more information about where you were going next. That was the hard part of paleontology - letting the fossil tell you it's secrets, not making assumptions. Assumptions could lead to mistakes, and mistakes could lead to lost fossils.

She blew off the dust. She was working on the femur now, while one of her partners, Chang, worked on the head. The two of them had claimed this as their own, as the rest of their team worked on a Tarbosaurus. A much bigger specimen, though much less intact than the Ornithomimid.

"We lucked out," she said. "I really can't believe we got another one of these."

"I love their big creepy hands." Admitted Chang. "So, um, when is the museum coming to pick it up?"

Anise sighed, "I don't know. I really don't. Getting all the way out here isn't exactly easy. We may have the whole thing excavated by the time they do."

"It is a war zone."

Anise's ears tuned to the environment again, and she could hear, off in the distance, the low rumbling of an engine and the thunder of a very familiar kind of tire tread.

"Speaking of." She grumbled.

Their campsite was, as one might expect, rather ramshackle. They had two RVs, three tents, and one quick build shack, and that was it. They had some creature comforts in it, but not many. It was a shock they were able to get the internet out here at all, and sometimes they still had to sync it up through their phones, which only held a charge because of the batteries.

In normal paleontology, the danger came from being out in remote places with little access to emergency services should something go wrong. In Mongolia today, the danger came from the war.

She ran to the RV and got herself a pair of binoculars, scanning the horizon from the direction she heard the sound. Sure enough, a caravan of military vehicles, tanks included, was making its way towards their humble camp, emblazoned with the insignia of the People's Republic of China.