Behind the book
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Dinosaurs are so commonplace now, in museums and on the silver
screen, that we almost take their magnificence for granted. But
what, I wondered, would it have been like to be that first person
to dig up a massive dinosaur ? Imagine the excitement, the
torrent of questions: “What on earth have I discovered?”
My initial research on the first documented dinosaur find
(Richard Owen, 1842, the Iguanadon, in London of all places!)
quickly brought me to the pioneering American paleontologists
Edward Drinkwater Cope and Charles Othniel Marsh. Their rivalry
in the 1870s was known as the Wars: between them, they named
and cled over a hundred dinosaur species, while also
energetically trying to destroy each other’s careers. These two
larger-than-life characters were the inspiration for the
paleontologist hers in Every Hidden Thing. And if you’ve got
two hers who hate each other, doesn’t it make sense their
respective teenaged children will fall in love?
I had a lot to learn for this book. I tried to up on
anatomy so I could recognize joints and femurs and humeri. I
spent a lot of time at the museum, measuring T. rex’s and
centrosaurs and pterosaurs. But I also wanted to know what it was
like to swelter in the sun in search of fossils, so I managed to
get myself invited on a short field expedition in Dinosaur
Provincial Park in Alberta.
This was my Indiana Jones moment. I bought hiking boots and a
hat. I wanted a bullwhip but MEC wouldn’t sell me one. The
badlands terrain was like an ancient hidden world, literally
sunken below prairie level: buttes and ravines and coulees and
rocks of astonishingly different textures and colors. And
mosquitoes, lots and lots of them. During my stay I got a c
course in prospecting, quarrying out fossils, and preparing them
back in the lab. And I also got to ask my patient paleontologist
hosts about everything from the history of paleontology to how to
identify —something I was useless at. Prospecting, I felt
like a pesky cartoon character, calling out every few seconds,
“Don, hey, Don, is this ?” A glance was all it took for him.
“Nope. That’s glacial erratic limestone.” “Hey, Don, how about
this?” “That’s petrified wood.” “Hey, Don, I think I’ve got
something big here!” “That’s a rabbit skull. It’ll be a fossil in
65 million years.”
There were a ton of other things I needed to learn about. The
birth of American paleontology intersected with aggressive
American westward expansion, and increasing tension with the
American Indians prior to the Great Sioux War of 1876. I took
pains to research the Lakota Indians, whose homelands and way of
life were being stolen and eradicated, and I was fortunate to
have my manuscript reviewed in advance by a Lakota reader to make
sure my depictions of indigenous peoples were accurate and
respectful.
During my brief time in the badlands, one of the amazing things
I learned about paleontology was that the work methods haven’t
changed much in 140 years. You walk, you look, you dig, and when
you find , you shovel. It can be tedious and sweaty, but
exhilarating. After a day of prospecting, standing on a lookout,
I asked my host: “If you had a machine that could see inside all
these hills, would you do it?” He shook his head. “What would be
the fun of that?”
pterosaur Prospecting for pterosaur s in a seam of rock that
was once a Cretaceous lake bed.
Hadrosaur Helping quarry out a hadrosaur—this involved carefully
digging down, inch by inch, toward the s. The paleontologist
is at bottom left near the jaws. Notice he put me quite far back
from the good stuff so I could do as little damage as possible!
Tooth At the end of the field expedition my host slipped me this
dinosaur tooth as a souvenir! “Is it okay?” I’d asked, because
you’re not supposed to take fossils out of the park. He shrugged:
“There’s so many of them.” I had a bit of the amazing feeling my
main characters have when they discover the foot-long tooth of
the Black Beauty.
Beauty The Black Beauty, a T. rex skeleton at the Tyrrell Museum
in Drumheller, was the inspiration for the legendary T. rex
fossil in Every Hidden Thing. Its s are an amazing silvery
black color because of the manganese that leached into them
during fossilization.
Badlands A view of Dinosaur Provincial Park, in Alberta, Canada,
which has been prospected since the time of Cope and Marsh!
Jones Please let me have my Indiana Jones moment.
