At the top of the stairs the paleontologist set the steel
mug of coffee on the ledge, turned, and shut the door. He turned back, stooped
to grip the wolf-handle and then descended to his study, past the fevered, glassy
skyline of Tourment Verte, Lucid, Suisse Verte, and Grande Absente.
At the bottom of the stairs he turned left and headed
between rows of boxes toward his workdesk. On the left, he passed a large Allosaurus skull (a cast), then a stack
of papers that includes the complete correspondences between Gilmore and Dunkle,
and then a music stand that holds up an original copy of Osborn (1912) for
quick reference; on the right three full bookshelves, the last devoted entirely
to tyrannosaurids, conceal the wall like an onyx catacomb. The massive
surangular of an adult T. rex partly covers
the floor below the last cliff like rookery.
His hand reached for the dehumidifier and pressed the button
off; the fan stopped and silence lowered the drawbridge for his mind. He turned
to the table, littered with casts of Jane’s disarticulated skeleton: skull
bones, hemal arches, and other parts of the postcranium – whatever the moments demanded
– were at hand, unreturned to the orderly desk and shelves around the corner. To
the left, the flatscreen monitor stands above the ivory chaos like a hovering
monolith.
To the right the desk is stacked with papers and books, with
casts of a dentary and scapulocoracoid piled on top; binders of scientific
articles and photo albums of bones fill the seat next to his. He set the mug
between the casts of a quadratojugal and the hemal arches, and put the laptop
between the arches and a binder that is open to the appendix of Currie et al.
(2003), itself covered by the cast of the opposite dentary. The appendix is the one
he’ll next incorporate into his opus. He opened the laptop screen, and plugged
in the power cord and the external hard drive.
He resumed work at character 419 of Loewen et al. (2013), which
pertains to the relative sizes of the pubic and ischial peduncles of the ilium
as seen from the side. From that starting point, he included the rest of
the pelvic characters into the manuscript. An hour later he reached the femur; in
the meantime, a migraine steadily overshadowed the afternoon course of his
work. After another 40 minutes he stopped, leaving the last of the femoral
characters from Loewen et al. (2013) for the next day. The manuscript had
climbed to 382 pages.
References cited
Loewen, M. A., Irmis, R. B., Sertich, J. J. W., Currie, P.
J., and S. D. Sampson. 2013. Tyrant dinosaur evolution tracks the rise and fall
of Late Cretaceous oceans. PLoS ONE 8: 1-14.
Osborn, H.F. 1912. Crania of Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus.
Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 1: 3–30.
Currie, P.J., J.H. Hurum, and K.
Sabath. 2003. Skull
structure and evolution in tyrannosaurid dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica
Polonica 48: 227–234.
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