questions were just starting to come—“Are those from a dog?” “Why are there so many?” “Did you dig those up around here?”—when she spotted her salvation walking by, in a hurry, toward the main exit.
“Dr. Cox?” she called out, and then, when he didn’t seem to hear her, “Dr. Cox? Over here.” She actually waved one arm feebly over the heads of the kids. “Would you like to tell these students something about the dire wolf?” To the students, she confided, “Dr. Cox has dug up several of these himself. He’s a very famous paleontologist.”
Carter had been on his way out to Pit 91—his crew would be assembling there in a few minutes — but he could never resist a chance to talk to students, especially when it looked like a new docent was drowning.
“Sure, the dire wolf is a good friend of mine,” he said, striding to the front of the group, “and at one time he roamed in packs all around here. Up and down Wilshire Boulevard, all over the Farmers’ Market, in Hancock Park and Koreatown and Century City.” He knew from experience that it always helped to place these extinct creatures in the modern context at first — not only to get your listeners’ attention, but to bring the experience closer, to make it clear that the animals didn’t live somewhere else, as if on a movie set, but on the very spot where, today, everyone was walking and talking and, like the kids all the way in back, goofing around. His comments already seemed to be having the desired effect.
“Why’s he called a dryer wolf?”
Carter wanted to laugh, but he didn’t want to risk embarrassing the questioner. “Actually,” he said, keeping a straight face, “he’s called a
Carter stood in front of the prehistoric skulls — starkly black against the yellow light, displayed in four massive panels sixteen shelves high — and explained how these wolves differed from the wolf we know today. More heavily built, with a deeper chest, wider hips, shorter legs. Originally from South America, but scattered all over Central and North America by 130,000 years ago. The dominant carnivore in the New World by the Late Pleistocene.
“The late what?” one of the kids asked, and Carter had to remind himself that he wasn’t talking to NYU students anymore.
“The Pleistocene is what we call the period of time from about two million years ago to ten thousand years ago.” And then to make sure he had their attention again, “The dire wolf may have had a smaller brain than any wolf today, but he also had much bigger and more deadly teeth. The jaws of the dire wolf were so powerful he could jump on and bring down a much bigger animal than he was — a bison, say, or a camel — and crush its bones with his teeth.”
There was a moment of silence.
“And now I have to leave you so I can go and try to dig up one more!” He turned to the grateful docent and said, “They’re all yours.”
The pit, located on the museum grounds, was a two-minute walk away, and by the time he got there the afternoon crew was already at work. Claude, the retired engineer, was toiling in one corner, Rosalie in another, and Miranda had her arms up to the wrist in the goo.
“You’re late,” she said, teasingly. “I’m telling.”
“Who are you going to tell?”
“Oh yeah, you’re the big cheese.”
“A quick lesson in life,” Carter said. “There is always a bigger cheese.”
Claude snorted as he slopped another handful of tar into his bucket. “You can say that again.”
Rosalie mopped her brow with the back of one chubby arm and said, “I think I can feel a lot of stuff over here.”
“Me, too,” Claude said.
“Me three,” Miranda chimed in. Today, she was wearing a pink tube top and a necklace of little silver beads. Not exactly what Carter would have recommended for fieldwork.
Carter glanced around; they were all working in different quadrants, carefully marked off pieces of the grid, and they were all at almost exactly the same depth.
“It’s like I told you last time,” Miranda said. “I can still feel something really strange down here.”
Carter began to suspect they’d hit a lateral “pipe”—a section of the pit where a particularly dense concentration of fossils had accumulated. Sometimes this could happen. A large beast, perhaps a giant ground sloth or a long-horned bison, had ventured too far into the tar — which might have been concealed beneath a layer of brush and leaves, deposited by a running stream — and become trapped; just a few inches of the tar could do the trick. The youngest and strongest animals might have been able to extricate themselves, but the older ones, or the infirm, or the ones that exhausted themselves bellowing in fear and frustration, would not. Their cries would hasten their doom, in fact, drawing predators from far and wide. Packs of wolves, or saber-toothed cats, or American lions — who, unlike their African counterparts, traveled in pairs not prides — would have leapt on the trapped beast and tried to kill and devour it.
And many of them would have been trapped in turn.
Carter had seen evidence of such mad scrambles before, piles of broken bones and fangs and claws, but glancing over the wide expanse of the pit, nothing quite so broad and focused as this. What was at the bottom of it? What had attracted so many creatures to the kill, and dragged so many to their own death?
“What have you got over there, do you think?” he called to Claude.
“Can’t say for sure,” Claude replied, “but it feels like a neck or collarbone. I can show you right where it is.”
The surface of the pit was crisscrossed with narrow wooden walkways, perched just inches above the tar; Carter walked carefully to Claude’s corner, then knelt down beside him. He was wearing shorts today, and the wooden boards were sharp and hard on his knees.
“It’s a few inches down,” Claude said, pointing to a spot right between them.
Carter leaned forward and put one hand into the glistening black muck. It was warm and viscous, as always, and gave him a slight shiver as he plunged his hand deeper into it. His fingertips grazed something hard and angular, exactly where Claude had indicated.
“You feel it?”
“I do.” But it was still so immersed in the tar, and out of sight, that he could only guess what it was. “Right now, I’d say it’s a machairodont of some kind.”
“A what?” Rosalie said.
“Miranda,” Carter threw out, “can you answer that?”
Miranda bit her lower lip. “I’m not sure they covered that at UCLA.”
“What if I said it was probably a
“Oh, that I know!” she piped up. “It’s a saber-toothed cat.” Claude tried to applaud with hands coated with tar, and Miranda laughed. “I remember the name because it sounds like the cat is smiling.”
“But how can you tell it’s not some other cat, like a scimitar or a western dirktooth?” Claude asked. He’d been reading up on his paleontology, and Carter knew he liked to try it out.
“I can’t,” Carter admitted, “with any certainty.” He let his fingers probe a little deeper. “But something tells me I’m touching the hyoids, or throat bones. The fact that the saber-tooths had these is what tells us they could roar like a lion.” Along with the wolves, they were one of the most commonly excavated fossils at the site — a ruthless killer, with especially powerful forequarters for holding their prey while their massive fangs did the rest. While it had been commonly assumed that the cats attacked their prey by biting and breaking their necks, Carter believed they actually preferred to attack from below, ripping into the soft belly of their victims and then patiently waiting for the creature to expire from blood loss before devouring the remains. Over seven hundred saber-toothed skulls had been found at the La Brea site and only two of them had shown teeth broken with wear; if the cats had been lunging at other animals’ hard and strong-muscled necks, Carter reasoned, there’d be more missing and broken teeth.
But his was the minority view so far, and he hoped soon to finish the paper that would lay out his case in full.
“What about mine?” Rosalie asked. “What have I got?”
There were moments, like right now, when Carter felt a bit like a grade school teacher, with a bunch of
