On Drilling at a Rock for Three Hours

My hair smells like rocks

The tool buzzes loudly, with small scraps of rock flying into my hair, on my shirt, and onto my protective glasses. I make a mental note to stand near the fume hood, so the dust can get sucked up, brush some of the rocks out of my hair, and continue on. 

I drill* (It’s not really a drill, more like an air scribe tool, but that flows worse in a title) at an Apatosaurus leg, a bone that’s been buried for a little over 150 million years.

Apatosaurus is a species of sauropod dinosaur dating back to the late Jurassic period, around 152-151 million years ago. The animal’s fossils are found in the Western United States, and their average lengths were 69-75 feet. While not especially notable for a sauropod, they were impressive nonetheless. This specimen was a younger creature. They would have the youthfulness of a high schooler, still growing and unknowing of their awaiting doom. 

I had worked myself into a routine as I worked on the specimen, freeing it from its stony tomb so that its bones saw the light of day, or more accurately, the LED lights of the lab, again. Within three hours on the first day of working on it, I had done away with over half of the stone covering the bone, its black color finally becoming the most obvious sight. 

And what a beautiful sight it was. I kept on drilling for the next week, three hours on both Tuesday and Thursday, enjoying the act as if it was a religious rite. I was unfazed by how it made me smell strongly of rocks (they have a surprisingly noticeable odor). As I drilled the details, the sheer magnitude of what I was doing hit me out of nowhere. 

This animal had been buried, unseen, for over 150 million years. Geological timescales were never something I took lightly, but the sheer scale of them is not something I often consciously consider. Most interestingly, the Apatosaurus isn’t even old compared to the Earth. And is the Earth even old compared to the universe? And what can we compare the universe to? 

I feel like these questions are getting a bit too philosophical and might be treading into territory unfitting for a Her Campus article. So, I’ll let you mull it over alone.

I realized that I had to reposition the fossil to drill at the other side better. So I did, turning around the specimen as if it was nothing, which is when the second realization hit me.

I had been manhandling this fossil, tossing it between my palms like it was just your average rock (Fossils are technically rock, but we can quantify a difference). 

The third realization was that I was doing something I used to dream about. 

Embarrassing as it is to admit sometimes, I’ve always had a special interest in dinosaurs and other prehistoric life. It had been my dream for as long as I can remember to work with them. And here I was, doing exactly that. 

My obsession started when I was a toddler, aged somewhere around three, I think? I don’t know exactly, except that it coincided with when I learned how to read. I was a fresh immigrant to the US, my reading now switching to English. I do have faint memories of being able to read the Devanagari script, but that skill has all but died apart from the letter L. The irony is not lost on me. That’s an aside, though. 

In the handling of this specimen, I felt a strange bond, not just to the animal who never knew of me, but to the animals I will never know. 

Being caught in your feelings doesn’t finish the job, though. I shook away these ruminations and went back to the trance of removing the rock.

• dinosaurs
• geology
• research
• science