expression of the grasslands, without any doubt, was the buffalo. What would it have been like to put your ear to the ground and feel the rumbling vibration of thousands of hooves running across the plains, somewhere out of sight? What if we could step back a lifetime or two, to 1873, and ride south from the Cypress Hills, day after day for a week, with buffalo on all sides?
The great herd running away,
The buffalo running,
Their drumming hooves
Send dust clouds billowing to the sky
And promise good hunting
The buffalo and her child approaching,
Mother and Calf coming
Turned back from the herd,
Promise abundance.3
Once the heart and soul of the prairie ecosystem, the buffalo is now described by scientists with the International Union for Conservation of Nature as “ecologically extinct.” Although today’s herds number in the tens of thousands, virtually all of the survivors endure a hemmed-in, semidomesticated existence as commercial livestock and park specimens.
Worse yet is the news that damage to prairie ecosystems is not limited to the past. Even now, the populations of grassland birds—from chestnut-collared longspurs to Sprague’s pipits and from bobolinks to burrowing owls—are decreasing year by year, exhibiting faster and more consistent declines than any other similar habitat group. The latest data indicate that aerial insectivores, including the nighthawks that dart over Eastend on summer evenings and the swallows that dance along the creek, are also experiencing a calamity. Nobody knows why the populations of these species have dropped so sharply, but the general consensus is that the remaining grasslands are so impoverished that they can no longer provide the birds with what they need to survive in abundance.
And yet here in the Frenchman Valley, the mink are still side-slipping into the moist grasses at the edge of the water the way they have always done, and the rough-winged swallows nest in cutbanks along the river just as they did when Wallace Stegner was young. Despite everything that has been lost and everything we are now losing, the landscape around Eastend remains radiant with life. Imagine walking down the main drag at dusk and looking up to the beat of powerful white wings, as a flight of swans whooshes low overhead, following the course of the street. Imagine the hollow hoo-hoo-hooing of great horned owls in the trees outside your house. Breathe in and fill your lungs with reassurance. Breathe out and exhale your grief. Give yourself permission to walk in beauty.
The buffalo ecosystem—the wild prairie—is irreclaimably lost and gone, but its spirit continues to linger in the hills and valleys around Eastend. If my initial experience of the town had brought on a bout of childhood nostalgia, our encounters with the life along the creekside invoked a deeper, earthier past. And Eastend had another source of consolation to offer, though I didn’t recognize it as such at first. After all, you don’t typically expect to find comfort in a dinosaur museum. The T.rex Discovery Centre is Eastend’s marquee attraction, and like everything else in town, it is an easy few minutes’ walk from our house. To get there, you simply walk out the back door and down the alley (past the old swimming hole and Stegner’s childhood home), take a sharp turn to the right, and cross the river on an old iron bridge. At a T-junction, a yellow-and-black traffic sign may urge you to continue up the north hill, with a promise or perhaps a threat. It reads: T.rex Dead Ahead.
And there’s our goal, set into the hillside and fronted by a sleek curtain of silvery glass. Officially opened in 2003 as a joint project of this jaunty little community and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, the center houses the fossilized remains of “Scotty,” one of the most complete tyrannosaurus skeletons ever uncovered. Most of her bones (for, yes, Scotty turned out to be regina rather than rex) are stored, together with thousands of other wonders, in the state-of-the-art paleontology laboratory that’s to your right as you enter the wide front doors. Even so, her terrible presence dominates the place. She bears down on you from the life-sized mural in the main display gallery, gape jawed and toothy. She leers from a nearby plinth, a disembodied head with cold snake eyes and scaly skin. If I were the triceratops displayed on a nearby bench, I’d seriously consider making a run for it.
Scotty was a Late Cretaceous predator that lived, and died, about sixty-five million years ago. Thereafter (until 1991, when a worn tooth and caudal vertebra were found protruding from the dirt) her mineralized bones lay entombed in a bleak, arid tributary of the Frenchman River, about half an hour’s drive southeast of town. Officially known as Chambery Coulee, the quarry is fondly regarded by paleontologists as “the Supermarket of the Dinosaurs.” In and around Scotty’s disarticulated bones lie the traces of an entire extinct world: fish scales, turtle skulls, champsosaur ribs, crocodile teeth, the frail tibiotarsus of a long-dead bird. Here, too, are the fragmented remains of Edmontonsaurus saskatchewanensis (the typical duck-billed dinosaur of the Late Cretaceous era) and of Triceratops horridus (sometimes crushed within fossilized T. rex dung). The triangular tooth of a pachycephalosaurus, the fang of a dromaeosaurid, or raptor.
It takes a few rounds of the gallery to begin to take everything in. These monstrous, fantastical beasts, with their horns and their fins and their bird-feet, had lived in a lush subtropical forest near the shore of an inland sea. They had lived and been buried here. And to think that I had been getting all tingly when I picked up echoes from my childhood or, across mere centuries, conjured up the vanished abundance of the buffalo prairie. Now I was being invited to stride lightly back over millions of years, to confront the final days of the Age of Reptiles. Relatively soon after Scotty died, a massive asteroid crashed into the Gulf of Mexico (near the present-day town of Chicxulub) with the force of a hundred million megatons of TNT, causing an apocalypse of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, incandescent ejecta, and a pall of ash and dust that enveloped the planet. This cataclysm marked the end of the terrible lizards.
And yet, out of this cosmic disaster, strange new life was born. Could it be that the mad genius of evolution is more ruthless and resourceful than we give it credit for? Perhaps, despite all of humanity’s worst efforts and the extinction crisis that we are bringing down on our own heads, life will eventually flood the world with its new inventions, as beautiful and grotesque as those that have been lost to the ravages of the past. It’s a brutal hope, but hope nonetheless.
At the T.rex Centre, crossing the threshold of mass extinction is as simple as stepping through a door. Leaving Scotty and Co. behind, we proceed through an archway and find ourselves circling around the spotlit skeleton of yet another gargantuan beast, this one sporting humped shoulders; a scooped-out, square-jawed skull; and a pair of bony spurs that sprout from what must have been its snout. A caption identifies it as a brontothere, or “thunder beast,” a long-vanished relative of the rhinoceros and the horse that lumbered around these hills for a thousand thousand years, sometime after the extinction of the dinosaurs. An artist’s rendition across the back wall combines the torso of a hippo with the hide of an elephant and a lugubrious wattled head that only a mother brontothere could love. The animal stands in a broad savanna, near the edge of a meandering stream, delicately protruding its loose upper lip to browse on the leaves of a tree.
Again, we are asked to imagine this scene playing out here. If the major repository of dinosaur bones lies just south of town, fossils from the Age of Mammals have been discovered in a number of sites to the north, east, and west, all within easy reach of Eastend. Together, these deposits document the epoch immediately following the impact disaster and pick up the story again in the era of the brontotheres. From then on, beginning about forty-five million years before the present and continuing for thirty million more, the record is remarkably rich and continuous. The Calf Creek quarry, straight north of town, for example, has yielded teeth and bones from more than seven dozen mammalian species, including Hesperocyon gregarius (the oldest known member of the dog family), tiny
