Romanticizing reptiles no one else cares about
Wyoming was cruel. The sun beat down on my arms, cooking me alive right then and there. I hadn’t showered for 10 days. I was covered in red dust, indistinguishable from the blood and cuts on my cuticles.Â
And I loved every second of it.
As miserable as this experience sounds, it was all a small piece of a larger scientific puzzle – one of ancient animals that no one outside of a select breed of researchers cares about. Due to being one of the few people in the world who care, I went out to the middle of the Wyoming wilderness with my lab, a choice no reasonable person would ever make.
But to answer why I’d make the choice, we need to backtrack a little more. I first immigrated to the United States at around the age of three. I was already reading, and I had always craved learning. My mother did what came naturally to her academic mind – she brought me straight to the library. It was there that I saw a book with a dinosaur on its cover, which immediately captured my attention and drew me to open it up and borrow it. Apparently, I finished it quickly. From there, an obsession came about, as it did for many other children that age. The only difference is that I never grew out of it. I’ve been obsessed with prehistoric life in general for as long as I can remember, so it was only logical that I’d end up going out to the middle of nowhere to go dig at rocks.
The rock layer we dug in was around 230-238 million years old, during the Triassic. Dinosaurs were not a dominant family at that point. What we were digging were other archosaurs – the same family dinosaurs (and therefore birds) and crocodilians are in. The consensus is that most of the bones we uncovered are from a pseudosuchian, an archosaur closer to crocodilians than to birds (and therefore dinosaurs). There is some controversy as to what exactly lies in the rocks out there, due to some issues from a paper from the 70s, but I don’t want to bore any reader with the details. We didn’t go straight to digging though; the first couple of days were spent surveying. I loved this part a lot, as I had an excuse to go out into the middle of the wilderness all alone and just look at rocks and the terrain. I do consider myself full of wanderlust, as I went farther out than anyone else, crawling into small ravines, climbing to the tops of hills, and not finding much of anything apart from a Native American flint (which we left there) and a Triassic beetle burrow which I kept due to its insignificance to science.Â
Maybe I shouldn’t have strayed. Maybe I should’ve stayed in the same vicinity as the others and tried digging on the hill we did eventually find the bones under. That being said, I don’t regret my forays. I don’t regret the muscle aches from jumping into the ravines nor do I regret the insects swarming around me as I reached the top of that giant hill. The hill was fun. The top was actually Jurassic rock, therefore irrelevant to what we were digging, and had giant slabs of stone with ripples of water that flowed in a time before flowers. That rock was off-white, whereas what we had to dig in was red, dusty and coated every surface it came into contact with. After a while it seemed to become a part of me, my skin and hair coated in it. With no shower for hundreds of miles in either direction, wet wipes and ice cubes from our coolers had to suffice, but it barely made a dent in the layers of dust. The elevation was high up, and every night I’d see storms mulling about hundreds of miles away. I was on top of the world.
I found my fair share of bones. My favorite one is when I went to use the restroom (the side of the hill), I stumbled upon a giant bone fragment, presumably from the pseudosuchian. Probably a leg bone, I concluded, captured by its almost opalescent color and texture. I’d also found some vertebrae, another radius and some other assorted bones. They were beautiful, so tough to have survived this long yet so fragile, containing the story of an animal I’ll never get to touch.Â
I tried not to let the ghosts of the past possess me.
How strange, to die under the Triassic sky just to get found again by the descendants of those little furry creatures that used to run in the shadows. I’d find myself imagining their world, replacing the grass with ferns, imagining a wetness modern Wyoming wouldn’t give me apart from a few high-speed thunderstorms, intermittent and remarkably short. I imagined the owners of the bones guarding their babies like modern crocodilians do, their anatomy so familiar yet so foreign. Our limbs share the same bones, a sign of our shared ancestry in the first amphibians to crawl out of that ancient water.Â
Did I gain any new profound knowledge about myself? I can’t say that I did, yet this experience was wholly changing, if only for the paleontological skills I gained. I’ve always been emotional about prehistoric life – I cried a little tear of joy when seeing that the Wikipedia page for dinosaurs was in the present tense, for example. Something about the science of paleontology makes me feel a kind of emotion I can’t properly describe, halfway between hollowness and bliss. It’s the way that science as a whole is a giant labor of love, despite all the unfeelingness others have given it. We wouldn’t have been out in the middle of Wyoming, going days without cleaning ourselves just for ancient creatures the rest of the world doesn’t even know about if not for our love of science and of the animals. I would not spend my days and nights studying ancient creatures if not for my love of these creatures, amused by the thought of a younger me seeing what I do now, as her love was the same.Â