The first thing I saw the next morning was Newcombe in a housecoat, carrying his toothbrush. What a sight. Soon he was barking at us and we were all “up and at ’em,” as he put it.
Even when we were dressed and ready to roll, we all sort of looked as if we had been sleeping in garbage cans or something. I hate combing my hair, mostly because even when I do comb it, it still looks like a mess. A “riot of black hair” my mom calls it. Dad says it always looks like someone cut it with a lawnmower. Actually, no one wants their hair to really look combed, so I wasn’t so badly off. I even heard one of the girls back at school whisper to her friend that she thought it looked kind of cool. I never told anyone about that, no one. But afterwards, I really didn’t want to comb it any more.
So we were all looking kind of grungy, even for us. We were rubbing our eyes and stumbling out of Dinosaur Hall, moving down towards the cafeteria. That was when I realized that Dorothy Osborne was with us. She had just sort of materialized, like some sort of alien from Star Trek—not a gross one, though. And she didn’t look like she’d been sleeping in a garbage can. She looked all neat and tidy, everything in place. Girls have this weird ability to do that. Her hair wasn’t in pigtails now; it was all combed out. And I mean combed, like it was glowing or something.
“What’s on the schedule today?”
“Stuff,” I said.
She laughed.
“I think maybe we’re going on the dig.”
“One of the museum’s ‘Day Digs’? Really? They’re pretty awesome.”
“But you know what I really want to do?”
“What?”
“I want to go hiking in the badlands. That’s just got to be cool.”
“It is. We do it all the time. Done it since we were little. Kids get lost in the badlands sometimes, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And there are scorpions and coyotes and black widow spiders and rattlesnakes and all sorts of stuff around. And weirdos live out there too, in caves. Or at least that’s what people say. I’ve never seen any of them.”
“Caves?”
“Well, the story is that when the area first got settled by white people, some of the men who came here to mine the coal didn’t have enough money for houses, so they just put roofs into the earth above the caves in the badlands cliffs and lived there.”
“Cool.”
“And some of them, or their ghosts or something, are still there.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her quietly, hoping she wouldn’t think that was a totally moronic question.
But Dorothy Osborne was full of surprises. She didn’t even blink. “Sure,” she said. “Saw one once.”
“So did I,” I sort of whispered.
“You did?” She didn’t whisper, and she actually looked intrigued. “Where?”
“In Newfoundland,” I said, a little louder. “In a place called Ireland’s Eye, an abandoned island almost out in the ocean. It was awesome. I’ll never forget it.”
“The one I saw was in the badlands.”
“Wow.”
“Late one night, a friend and I were out there, and we saw something. It didn’t seem human, because it was actually very small…but it looked like it was standing up on two legs…it had these yellow eyes…” She paused, as if seeing the ghost again. “We were a long piece away,” she added quickly. “So maybe we were kind of imagining it. We were never sure what it was.”
“Weren’t you afraid to go out there after that?”
“No. Well…maybe a bit at night. But there’s nothing wrong with being a little afraid. Kind of gets the adrenaline going. Besides, Drumheller is so far away from everything, it’s nice to have some excitement, even if it scares you. But I wouldn’t want to get lost out there this week.” Before I could say anything else, the teachers called us all to attention in the cafeteria. Soon we were settled in to demolish about a million pancakes and sausages. Newcombe sat in a corner with the adults and read the day’s Calgary Herald. He didn’t seem too interested in his meal. After a while he lowered his head and had a long conversation with Ophelia. Then he got up and went over to a pay phone. It seemed like he stayed there for about half an hour, talking, with a very serious look on his face.
By the time he’d returned to Ophelia, conferred with her again, and headed over to us, we were all done. We’d lined up two tables and, using crumpled-up newspaper for pucks, were playing our own version of table-top hockey—hit the goalie in the face and it’s in. Ralph turned out to be at least as good as any of us, Hanna surprised Terry and nailed him right in the bugle with a slapshot, and Dorothy, of course, was right into it, big time. That Stockwell guy wouldn’t even play, said we were too noisy or something.
We started straightening up as the Newcombes and Mr. Tinman clomped over. The Bomb was facing their way and gave us a signal. They looked as if someone had just stolen their Christmas presents.
“Boys, we may have to operate on an abbreviated schedule,” said Newcombe.
“Which means?” asked Bomber.
“Which means we might not stay here for the whole eight days,” said Ophelia. She looked kind of relieved, actually.
“Why?” asked Rhett.
“Never mind why for now,” continued Norris. “I will tell you later. What matters is that we have some very fine things to do here in the Dinosaur Valley of Drumheller, nestled amongst the badlands of Alberta, and we can manage to do quite a number of them in the four or five days we will have available to us.”
“Four or five days?” I said. Bomber and Terry groaned.
“That’s right. Now we—”
“It’s the Reptile, isn’t it?” said Terry matter-of-factly.
Newcombe paused. He looked at Ophelia and then at Tinman, and then continued as though Terry hadn’t spoken.
“Today is our day to dig up some real dinosaur fossils. That’s what our minds will be trained on, nothing else. Right, Mr. Tinman?”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Newcombe. And the mind of one of our own pupils will be trained upon it as well.” He turned to his students. “Let’s see if we can provide some good old-fashioned Drumheller hospitality by supplying these out-of-towners with a knowledgeable companion on their exciting excavating adventure. I need a volunteer. Hands?”
I glanced at Dorothy. Her hand shot up. Unfortunately, so did Stockwell’s. If we have to put up with that pinhead all day, I thought, I’ll throw up.
“Um.” Mr. Tinman looked back and forth between his two students. “I think it would be nice to have a lady on the tour. Dorothy Osborne, you may go on the dig. And you will have the option of accompanying our guests for the next three days as well. That is, if you feel up to being their hostess?”
“I do,” said Dorothy.
She had this funny look on her face. It was sort of a smile. But there was more to it than that. It was sly. What was she thinking about? Making us feel at home? Or how she might scare the life out of us city boys?
About half an hour later we were heading out from the museum on a hike, right into the badlands. We weren’t too pleased about the possibility of our trip being shortened, but four or five days seemed a long time away right now—maybe things would change. And besides, this dig promised to be fun. Mr. Lyons, the Hadrosaur-man, was with us, of course, as a guide, and so was Mr. Tinman.
We stopped just a few kilometres away, at a place called Kneehill Creek. This was where Joseph Burr Tyrrell, while doing fieldwork for the Geological Survey of Canada in 1884, had stumbled upon the first dinosaur skull found and documented in the area. Tyrrell would accomplish many more great things in his career, but it was that one extraordinary moment that put his name on the landmark museum we had slept in the night before.
I could almost imagine him: a young, bearded man with little, wire-rimmed glasses, travelling by canoe down the Red River in the heat of an Alberta summer, mapping the area and examining coal and mineral deposits in the green valleys and up and down the steep cliffs. He would have been used to seeing Blood and Peigan people, and a few scattered white settlers. But then he comes upon another sort of beast entirely, a beast no one has ever heard of, or even imagined. “It is a creature,” he will write, “from a time beyond our fathoming.”
It’s summer. The sun is high; the heat is intense. About to seek shade for lunch, he sees something staring out at him from the side of a hill. It’s a skull, nearly as long as a fully-grown man, the fossilized head of a massive, ancient lizard. A few teeth remain: the knife-sized, ripping instruments of a mean, meat-eating predator.
Later investigations would reveal that this dinosaur weighed about two tonnes, was nearly ten metres long, and moved on powerful hind legs that allowed it to run at speeds of up to thirty kilometres an hour. It could tear its victims’ limbs apart or crush them in its powerful jaws; it could kick them with massive sledgehammer blows from its giant, muscular legs. This smaller but quicker version of its cousin, the Tyrannosaurus rex, was Alberta’s very own ancient killing machine. So they called it albertosaurus: “the lizard from Alberta.”
These weren’t the first dinosaur remains ever discovered, or even the first in Canada, but Tyrrell’s find set off a frenzy of searches soon known as the Great Canadian Dinosaur Hunt, and the world’s paleontologists began heading for Drumheller and southeastern Alberta.
My mind was far away, imagining those early discoveries of prehistoric life, when I suddenly realized that Hadrosaur-man was telling us something.
The word “dinosaur,” he was saying, comes from two Greek words: deinos, meaning terrible, and sauros, meaning lizard. That was perfect. They were like monsters from some sort of IMAX movie, like salamanders on steroids that were fifty times your size and could rip you in two. Terrible lizards for sure!
Paleontologists, he explained, had made many more amazing discoveries in western Canada: other examples of albertosaurus; three-horned, five-tonne triceratops; herds of huge, plant-eating, duck-billed hadrosaurs; ankylosaurs with armour-plated eyelids and weapon-tails that ended in big war clubs; and of course a T. rex, the “tyrant” of its day.
Among the adventurers was Charles Sternberg, who came from the United States but stayed in Canada once he discovered the dinosaur treasures of Alberta. Sternberg became one of the country’s leading experts on prehistoric life. Another was American Barnum Brown, named for the famous circus impresario and just as bold, who found his way to the bone beds of both Drumheller and what would one day be Dinosaur Provincial Park via the Red Deer River on a ten-metre-long flatboat, complete with tent. He found literally tonnes of incredible, exotic remains.
Hadrosaur-man was leading us right towards some bone beds that were still being dug. But it wasn’t as if we were just going to start hacking away in a particularly important one. Skeletal fossils can be pretty fragile. We were going to a pre-arranged site, and there wasn’t much chance we were going to stumble upon some sort of amazing discovery on the way there.
The badlands were originally under a huge ancient sea, where all sorts of soft sands and silt had gathered. Then, when the glaciers came and went about fifteen thousand years ago, they just carved up all that soft land. And wind and other natural forces caused even more erosion. That’s why they look so freaky, and why they’re perfect for dinosaur bones. You can look at the badlands and see many millions of years, levels of our history right in the earth, older as you go lower. The badlands look almost decorated with horizontal stripes of time, each band a slightly different colour. And, once you get 65 million years down, the fossilized bones of those “terrible” giant beasts can be found, exposed by erosion, either in bits and pieces or sometimes in amazing whole stone skeletons, caught in their swirling death poses, lying in their bone beds.
Hadrosaur-man put on a good show of letting us look for some new discovery. We trudged around in what was now burning heat. It was like being out in our very own Canadian desert. We all had hats on and about ten layers of sunscreen. We kind of goofed around a little, aware that we probably wouldn’t find anything there. Then, finally, Hadrosaur-man led us to the actual dig site.
We walked for about another kilometre before we came to it, but the effort was worth it. There were a couple of paleontologists already working when we arrived. They stood up, shook hands with us, and began explaining what they were doing.
Before us we could see the partial skeletons of about four dinosaurs, embedded in the dirt. When they’d first started working on this site they’d used larger instruments, but now, as the stone-bones emerged clearly, they were down to using more delicate tools: chisels and little spades, that sort of thing. What we were looking at, one woman explained, was part of a herd of centrosauruses, a six-metre-long ceratopsian, or horned dinosaur, with a head about a metre long and possibly dark hide (no one knows for sure what colour the dinosaurs were). Not far away was a bed of lambeosauruses. They had something paleontologists called a “head crest” on top of their skulls. From a distance, it made them look as though they had some sort of wild, slicked-back hairdo, kind of like Elvis in his prime. The head crest was hollow in spots and sometimes actually had nasal passages. The way they were put together allowed them to make a sort of trumpeting sound. Apparently another hadrosaur, one called a parasaurolophus, gave out such a spectacular noise that it sounded as if it were blowing a trombone through the back of its head.
I made a comment about the lambeosaurus being amazing.
“That’s nothing,” said the woman. “There’s a dinosaur that had two brains. One was in its hips.”
They let us do some digging. We all got down on our haunches, even Newcombe and Ophelia. Me and the guys tried to be very gentle at our work at first (not wanting to bust a seventy-five-million-year-old fossilized bone in half), but Dorothy just started hacking away. I guessed she had done this before.
Newcombe was duded up like he thought he was Indiana Jones, wearing a brown leisure-suit jacket over a white shirt with those pocket pens; beige shorts that showed his knobby, hairy knees; black knee-socks under his work boots; and a sort of safari hat that made him look like what we called a “double-idiot.” He had that big briefcase with him and at one point he pulled a huge umbrella out of it, a parasol, and planted it in the ground near his work station for shade. Ophelia, a “triple-idiot,” was wearing a dress. It actually looked like a dress, too, one you might wear to a ball or something. And you could smell the perfume on her. Dorothy, of course, was also wearing one, but it was way different: a flowery, summer dress sort of thing with these black tights underneath and a baseball cap on backwards with three pigtails sticking out various holes. Funny thing about her…she didn’t seem to sweat.
We worked for about an hour or two, carefully clearing the dirt away from the bones. It was amazing to think about what we were doing: unearthing the corpses of these ancient beasts.
“These dinosaurs would be pounding and plodding around here in herds,” enthused Hadrosaur-man, “eating leaves or needles off giant trees, always listening for the sudden, violent appearance of an albertosaurus, or maybe a pack of raptors. Up above them there might be pre-historic birds, some like gigantic vultures with wingspans twice the length of your car.” He was getting all worked up again, big kid that he was, but I didn’t blame him. It would have been truly wicked.
When it was time to leave we all got up and stretched. We thanked the paleontologists and began walking away. That was when Terry stumbled on something no more than a few strides from the bone bed. He leaned down and picked it up. It was a bone, left intact.
“Whoa,” said Rhett quietly, walking up to him.
“What is it?” asked Bomber, his eyes bulging. “A T. rex? A triceratops?”
“Too small for that,” said Newcombe, coming forward. “Much too small. And besides, it isn’t fossilized. It’s an actual bone.”
Both Hadrosaur-man and the woman paleontologist had noticed our discovery and walked towards us. As we stood around looking at it, they were silent.
Finally, Newcombe turned to them. “I don’t recognize this. Do you?”
“Uh, yeah,” said the woman.
“And?”
“It’s from an animal that died very recently,” she said grimly.
“Recently?” asked Ophelia, a bit startled.
“And its owner was about twelve or thirteen years old.”
“Thirteen years old? What kind of animal is it, then?” said Newcombe.
“It’s, uh…a human being.”
As Terry dropped the bone, Ophelia fainted. She did a bit of a spiral as she fell, rolled over once, and landed right on the herd of lambeosauruses.