Page 88 of Down the Track

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‘Your site’s looking very organised, Jo,’ said Dot.

‘Thanks.’ The grid lines of pink string had been pegged out yesterday afternoon into a four-by-four schema of sixteen roughly equally sized squares. She’d attached numbered tags to the pegs so the site now matched a file in her computer, and she’d established that the deepest of the quadrants were those numbered one to nine, with the shallowest being the four furthest away from the rubble pile, numbered fourteen through sixteen.

The dig itself—a crater perhaps four metres wide—had a layer of silt on the bottom. Luckily the last rains out here had been light and the monsoonal deluges that could occur had so far been absent this summer.

Footprints were pressed into the silted surface. Hers, mainly, but also bird feet, marks of a large lizard and booted feet where no doubt police had jumped down to see if the soil had been disturbed.

‘The last crew scraped out a decent hole,’ said Ethel. ‘We were that disappointed when they didn’t find anything more than the piece we’d picked up ourselves, love.’

‘It’s a wide hole, yes,’ said Jo. ‘But I’ve learned a thing or two in the time since about the soil here.’

‘The black soil?’ said Ethel. ‘I heard about that up at the museum at Winton.’

‘Yes. I’m not sure why they call it black soil, because I’m not seeing anything here but red, but I’m no farmer. I just know that it’s self-mulching. That’s why the fences are always having to be replaced—the soil is constantly sifting downwards and rolling upwards. Stuff shifts within it. Hey, if we have time, Luke, we could visit that museum. They’ve got some massive dinosaurs on display, and you can go into the lab and see the techs and the volunteers working on huge fossil finds.’

‘Oh, yes, we love visiting Elliot and Matilda,’ said Ethel, naming two of the more well-known dinosaurs on display.

‘Sauropods, both of them, although they were different types and may have had different diets. By sauropod, I mean they were giant, four-legged plant eaters with long necks. Magnificent creatures. Fifteen metres long and three metres tall, which would be bigger than a bus; a lot longer, certainly. It was the farmer whose land the dig was on who understood the link between the soil type and the way a fossil that had rotated up to the surface might indicate more fossils below. As in, deep below. Digging down a metre or so, like we see here, is old school. It might do in different terrain like down near Apollo Bay in Victoria, or overseas, but in this soil, we have to dig deeper.’

Luke was eyeballing the pit. ‘No way would a school bus fit in there.’

Jo smiled. She’d never been one of those palaeontologists who worked with the public, but she could see the appeal. The questions were easy and answering them was fun.

‘It’s not like we’re digging up the actual body. A common scenario might be that a dinosaur died of old age, or suffered a fatal injury from a meat-eating dinosaur likeAustralovenator wintonensis—he was the one whose dig site I worked on as a volunteer last time I was in this region, a five-metre-long bully with three long claws that’d make him an effective hunter—and he’d die on the water’s edge, or maybe in the water itself and sink to the bottom. His bones would slowly scatter over a wide area and the little bones might get scavenged and carried away. And then—only if luck and sediment were acting in our favour—the right conditions would be in place for fossilisation to occur. That’s why we consider it to be exceptional if we find thirty per cent of a skeleton.’

‘Doesn’t seem much. Thirty per cent.’

‘Maybe. But that’s why we palaeontologists spend so much time in the lab. We share data like images and DNA sequencing with each other. Maybe one team has found thirty per cent in one site, and another team at the other side of the country has found ten per cent of an animal with similar DNA. We can stitch those fossil pieces together in a computer file and predict what it might have looked like, and whether an animal with its features has been dug up before.’

Luke had begun kicking his sneaker into the wall of the dig site, and she realised she’d been boring him but—and perhaps the presence of the Cracknells or the promise of cake had encouraged him—he’d been too polite to say so. Progress? Maybe.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I can get carried away. Okay, here’s my plan. Luke and I start clearing out the surface rubble into a soil pile. We’ll go quicker if we can leave the sifting of that to you. You’ll be looking for fragments, anything in that deep caramel tone we expect to see in a fossil. You can take a rest any time you need one.’ And Jo could resift the soil later if she felt the need. She turned to Luke. ‘Let’s tackle quadrant sixteen, and then reward ourselves in an hour with Dot’s cake.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘No. But I’d love it if you did …’

‘I guess I can, then.’

Jo gave herself an imaginary high five, then handed her son a trowel.

They settled into a rhythm. She and Luke took turns breaking up the excavation floor with the hand pick, then they each filled a bucket with debris. It was rough on the hands, but they had gloves and the digging was easy.

‘If you find something chunky, let me know,’ she said.

By ten o’clock they’d made a pile about the size of a sandpit and all four of them had agreed there was nothing of note in it. The cake, however, was exceptional.

Luke made it to eleven before he started to flag, so she suggested he take a breather in the shade, and he went into his swag and collected the graphic novel he’d brought with him, to the delight of Ethel and Dot, who had never seen one, let alone one written by someone they knew.

‘You’re so lucky, knowing a super famous author,’ she heard Luke say.

‘You’reso lucky, having a super smart scientist for a mum,’ she heard Dot say.

‘Yeah?’ Jo heard the amazement in Luke’s voice and rolled her eyes. Just a little. Facing away so he wouldn’t see.

She spent the next hour digging to the backdrop of her son reading to the Dirt Girls, an outcome she could not have envisaged even a week ago. She had trouble keeping the smile off her face. Being out here, away from Brisbane, reallywasa fresh start for them.

‘Tyson Jones knew, the moment his boots crunched on broken glass, that he’d arrived too late. His safe was empty. His desk drawers were askew. The evidence he’d spent six months collecting was gone.’