Jones and the Fossil

by Alan B. Sanderson

Author’s Note: I thought I would try my hand at a bit of fiction for a change. Let me know if you like the story.

It had been a year since the old man went missing, and everyone assumed he was dead. That was probably right.

Jones had worked with him since graduate school, fifteen years ago. Out on their first dig together he had given the old man a nickname that stuck: the Fossil. Everyone called him that, even his obituary in the Paleontological Society newsletter. It was remarkable, all that the old man had accomplished. His body of work had changed our understanding of Jurassic ecosystems. And Jones had been there at his side for much of it.

“Are you really gone, Fossil?” Jones said. “I feel like you could walk through that door any minute to say you found a new dig site.”

Jones was looking at a framed picture hanging on his office wall. In the picture he was standing next to the Fossil at Moss Canyon, where they had uncovered a complete skeleton and a nest site of Stegosaurus armatus ten years ago.

For the last hour Jones had been organizing his desk and bookshelves. He had pulled everything out of the desk drawers, and there were stacks of papers and books on every surface. His motivation began to wane, so he sat down in his desk chair for a minute.

“Things just aren’t the same without you,” he said, still looking up at the picture. “I don’t have any leads to follow. And I’m not sure I could do it all without you, anyway.”

Just then he noticed a scrap of paper at the back of an open desk drawer. Was that the Fossil’s handwriting on it? He reached down and picked it up. It was a set of coordinates with a simple annotation: “Great dig site.” Jones pulled up a map. The coordinates pointed to a place in the middle of nowhere, eastern Utah.

“Hmm. Never heard of a dig site there.” May as well follow the lead. At the very least it would get him out of the city for a while. Jones imagined finding his mentor out there digging by himself, but he knew that wasn’t likely.

~~~

“Well, this looks like a good place to find a fossil,” Jones said. He looked at the map to confirm he was in the right place. In the low valley before him he could see a small exposure of rock distinct from the rest of the landscape. “That’s Morrison formation.”

The Morrison formation is a layer of sedimentary rock from the late Jurassic period — about 150 million years ago. The sediments were deposited in a basin filled with rivers, streams, and dinosaurs. At least a dozen dig sites in four different states have produced significant fossils.

As Jones descended into the valley he came upon a circle of stones with weeds growing all around it and inside. It was a fire ring, judging by the old ashes inside. But no fire had burned here recently.

Ten feet from the fire ring there was a weathered tarp on the ground with large rocks holding its edges down on all sides. Dirt and sand had accumulated on the wrinkles of the tarp and between the rocks, and there were weeds growing in those places. Jones moved the rocks and pulled back the tarp. There on the ground was a human skeleton – fossilized in late Jurassic sandstone.

“What?!” Jones stared at the fossil in disbelief. Then he looked all around, as if someone might be watching him. “What kind of trick is this?”

But no one was there, not within 100 miles. It was a long way to come for a practical joke: 7 hours on the highway, 4 more on a rough dirt road, then 3 more on foot over desert mountain terrain without a trail.

“Why would you do this?” Jones said. “You never pulled pranks.” He couldn’t think of a thing the Fossil had ever done to harm him — not even as a joke.

The sun was going down soon. Jones sighed. Time to set up camp. He pulled the gear from his pack: bed roll, sleeping bag, rock pick hammer, butane stove, and a half-empty water bottle. Didn’t he have two bottles? Where was the other one? “I must have left it in the truck,” he thought. “I’ll have to leave early tomorrow, before it gets hot.”

Jones heard a scuffle in the weeds nearby. He looked up in time to see a lizard dash across a pile of rocks a few feet away, and then disappear beneath a sagebrush. “Did you leave me a water bottle?” The Fossil would often bury water at dig sites and mark the spot with a cairn. Jones went to investigate.

There was indeed an old bleach bottle full of water beneath the bottom rock, buried in the dirt. He dug around the sides and pulled it up. That water would make the return hike easier tomorrow. Right beneath the water jug he saw something else buried, and after another minute of excavation he pulled up an army surplus ammo box.

“Hmm, what’s this?”

Jones brought both of his discoveries back to the fire ring, where he sat down on a rock. He pried open the corroded metal box, and inside he found a thick notebook with the Fossil’s writing. Inside the front cover of the notebook was a letter addressed to Jones:

“Dear Dr. Jones,

“I hope you will find this little excursion to be well worth the effort.

“You and I are the only ones who know of this place, and of its secret. I first found the skeleton 60 years ago when I was an undergraduate, taking a long walkabout on a summer vacation. Initially I assumed it to be a hoax, like the Piltdown Man, or that I must be wrong about the geology, so I kept the discovery to myself.

“The skeleton is not a fake, Jones. Some years ago I had a small piece of it and the surrounding rock radiodated. They are 148 million years old, plus or minus.

“The implications are stunning! This man must have lived with the dinosaurs, but Homo sapiens did not appear on earth until less than half a million years ago. Simply put: either the fossil record of hominid evolution is terribly wrong (which it is not), or this man was a time traveler. And if time travel is possible, and if I could learn to do it, then I could also see the dinosaurs with my own eyes.

“I threw myself into the study of physics and electronics. In time, and after much trial and error which I have documented in this notebook, I had a working machine. Yes, Jones, as unbelievable as it may sound, I am a time traveler!

“My first trip to the Jurassic, trudging through the swamps of the Morrison Basin, was a transcendent experience! I spent hours at a time gazing on the stegosaurus and apatosaurus. I even killed and ate a young camptosaurus. (It tasted like chicken.)

“These safaris to the past were my secret delight, for I told no one about them, but over time I found that it helped me in my interpretation of fossils. I could imagine the ecology and biology with much greater ease than my colleagues could, because I had observed it firsthand.

“If this were my whole story, it would be interesting indeed! Sadly, it is not. Now I must confess to you that I am a fraud.

“Twenty years ago I became tempted, due to envy, to steal the success of a rival. Instead of using my time transporter to visit the distant past, I went back in time only ten years and visited my own office. On my desk I left a note similar to the one you found, with some location coordinates and a quick endorsement of its potential as a dig site. The results of this experiment were stunning! When I returned to work the next day I found that all of the published papers on my rival’s dig site had my name as the first author, and that I was chair of the department. My rival could not be found at all in the top journals.

“With such success I had to pull the same trick again, and then again, at least a half dozen times. With each attempt I found greater honors: bigger grant awards, species named after me, the presidency of the Paleontological Society. At first I went after my enemies and rivals, and then eventually I was tempted to steal the finds of my friends.

“Yes, even of you! I must own up to the sin. The Moss Canyon site, near your boyhood home, was supposed to be, and actually was, your find — the discovery that would propel your career into the stratosphere. Why was I not content to be the proud mentor? No! I stole it from you. Oh, what a coward I am! What a wretched thief!”

Jones stared at the book, mouth wide open. Moss Canyon — where the mating habits of Stegosaurus armatus were revealed — was his. Didn’t he know every trail, every tree, every rock of that place? How was it that the Fossil knew about the site before Jones could even tell him about it? Now it all made sense. Of course it was true!

His heart was racing, and his face felt hot. What kind of a man robs his own students of opportunity and success?

He glared at the letter.

“Realizing that I had irreparably harmed your career and reputation made me admit — with tremendous shame — that I had become an actual addict, no longer capable of self-control. Finding myself overcome with guilt, and needing some time alone to ponder, I escaped from the city and made the trek out here to see this old fossil again.

“The impression near the right hip was a mystery to me when I first excavated the skeleton 60 years ago. It looked like some mini-monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But now I knew what it meant: this was a man who lived in the smartphone age.

“Then I examined his dentition. Of course I had noticed that there were some absent teeth, but I was surprised to note that his missing ones were exactly the same as mine. I measured him once more, and found his height to be exactly my own. Also note the L3 compression fracture (from my fall off a cliff at Como Bluff), the right shoulder arthritis, and the right clavicular fracture (a boyhood injury).

“Jones, the nickname you gave me was prophetic. I am the Fossil! I am the man buried in the Morrison Basin!”

Jones turned his head and looked towards the fossil. The sun had gone down and the evening light was starting to fade, but he could easily see the smartphone at his hip, and the missing teeth.

His gaze fixed on the skull. Was this the man who had taught him virtually everything he knew about paleontology? Was this the man he had loved as a father?

“I trusted you!” Jones slammed the notebook shut and threw it on the ground. It landed in the cold ashes and weeds of the fire ring. “And you only cared about yourself!”

He stood up, grabbed the nearest rock, and threw it at the book in a rage. As he looked around for something else to throw, he saw the rock pick hammer next to his backpack. He snatched it up and moved towards the skeleton.

“I was there on every dig! I wrote the first draft of every paper, and every grant application! And this is the thanks you give me?!” Jones lifted the pick hammer above his head and landed a savage blow on the Fossil’s skull.

Sweat dripped from Jone’s brow and landed on the scattered fragments of the Fossil’s face. “What have I done?” Jones, who loved and cared for fossils, had damaged one in anger. And not just any fossil! This was the fossil of his dear missing friend! He kneeled down right on the skeleton’s rib cage, bending forward to arrange the bone fragments back into place. Tears fell from his eyes and mingled with his sweat on the Fossil’s bones.

“I’m sorry, Fossil,” he said. Jones cried with great heaving sobs for ten minutes.

At long last he went back to the fire ring, picked up the letter, and continued reading:

“Now I must exile myself to the past as punishment for stealing your future. Once I arrive in the late Jurassic I will destroy the time transporter beyond repair and live my final days among the dinosaurs. I trust that my death will be in the appropriate time and place to produce the fossil we have examined.”

“But before I go I will show you how to get your revenge. This notebook includes all of the instructions you will need to construct your own time transporter. Simply travel to the past and encourage your prior self to speed up the find at Moss Canyon. Or better yet, confront me with what you know and tell me to stop my behavior. I am a coward, and will surely behave better if I know I am observed.

“Again, please know that my remorse is deep. I am prepared to submit humbly to your vengeance, knowing that I surely deserve whatever actions your anger may motivate.

“With deepest regret that I cannot ever again call you my friend,

“The Fossil”

Jones took a big swig of water from the old bleach bottle. In the fading twilight he quickly flipped through the notebook, which contained schematic diagrams, mathematical formulas, and pages upon pages of step-by-step instructions. Then he laid the book aside and stared at the dark fire ring as the stars appeared overhead.

And now what was he to do? To use the time transporter to repair what the Fossil had broken? Or to seek revenge on the Fossil’s life and reputation? Or to see for himself the animals of the ancient past? These thoughts swirled in his head like the sirens’ song.

Late that night he sat looking at the stars, light that had traveled through hundreds of millions of years to reach him. The nearby bones of his friend, also hundreds of millions of years old, could be faintly seen in the starlight. He picked up the letter and turned it over in his hands, then held it to his chest.

~~~

In the morning he gathered some sagebrush and made a small fire. Into the flames he threw the notebook, and he watched it burn. Jones covered the bones of his mentor with a mound of stones six feet high. When the fire died down he put on his pack, picked up the old bleach bottle, and started the hike back to his truck. As he left the valley he turned back and looked at the mound of rocks below. “Farewell, my friend,” he said.

The next year he found the fossil bed that launched his career.

---

Cover art photo by Jesse Varner (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)