April 8, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Douglas Preston’s absorbing “The Day the Earth Died,” an account of paleontologist Robert DePalma’s discovery of an amazing fossil deposit in the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota. Preston visits the site:

When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. 

He describes DePalma digging (“DePalma poked the tip of an X-Acto into the thin laminations of sediment and loosened one dime-size flake at a time; he’d examine it closely, and, if he saw nothing, flick it away”), unearthing a fish fossil (“He chipped away around the paddlefish, exposing a fin bone, then a half-dollar-size patch of fossilized skin with the scales perfectly visible”), and preserving it in plaster (“One by one, he dipped the burlap strips in the plaster and draped them across the top and the sides of the specimen. He added rope handles and plastered them in”). 

He visits DePalma in his lab at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton:

He stood up. “Now I’m going to show you something special,” he said, opening a wooden crate and removing an object that was covered in aluminum foil. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass.

He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass – how fine that is. It’s my idea of an ideal sentence: specific, evocative, delightful, exotic. 

“The Day the Earth Died” is a Wunderkammern of fascinating items: golden blobs of amber (“Cretaceous flypaper”); the hip bone of a dinosaur “in the ceratopsian family, of which triceratops is the best known member”; a Cretaceous mammal burrow, with the mammal still inside it; a block of stone containing “a sturgeon and a paddlefish, along with dozens of smaller fossils and a single small, perfect crater with a tektite in it”; a fossil forearm belonging to Dakotaraptor; lonsdaleite, a hexagonal form of diamond that is associated with asteroid impacts; “flooded ant nests, with drowned ants still inside and some chambers packed with microtektites”; shark teeth; “the thigh bone of a large sea turtle”; a gigantic ginkgo leaf; “an unhatched egg containing an embryo—a fossil of immense research value”; on and on. I enjoyed it immensely.