to tarp, rolling each one backward. My mouth fell open as I absorbed the fact that every tarp covered at least one complete whale skeleton, and sometimes several on top of one another. Every black tarp, dozens spread up and down the road-cut quarry, demarcated a whale skeleton. The sheer density of complete skeletons outstripped everything I thought that I knew about how whales get preserved as fossils.
The skeletons, some thirty feet long, were almost all complete in a way that fossil whales hardly ever are, nose to tail. Many looked as if the creature had died in place, carefully turned on its back, and then been pressed flat over geologic time, like a preserved flower. Skulls were easy to spot, their triangular projections and bowed jawbones at the end of a trail of bricklike vertebrae. Rib cages collapsed toward tails, like gigantic Slinkys. In many skeletons, the ribs were still adorned with shoulder blades connected to arms and even finger bones. The fossil whales at this site were jaw-droppingly complete. And it made no sense that there were so many, so close together. I couldn’t think of any other field site of fossil whales like it.
I was stunned. Tuareg gabbed away with a positively gleeful Caro and her students. I walked over to where Jim stood at the south end of the quarry, taking photos and rubbing sediment between his fingers. We silently watched the sun slipping over the horizon, evening cloud banks bringing a cool wind. In the distance, a single round peak—El Morro, a weathered mound of igneous rock—capped the view.
“It’s over,” Jim said, flatly. I looked north and south across the entire quarry, more than a football field in length. I knew exactly what he meant: anything we had thought about doing needed to make room for this site and the several dozen skeletons that stretched up and down the hill in each direction. Measuring the stratigraphic columns across the Caldera Basin, slotting in all of the fossils we already knew about, deciphering that geologic map full of faults—it all needed to wait. My hours and hours of planning had focused on a sure thing, returning with bags of rock samples and with notebooks full of the makings of promised papers. Entire whale skeletons were not part of that plan, certainly not dozens of them.
I breathed in, anxious and unsure. I was frustrated with myself for not listening to Tuareg more carefully earlier on, paralyzed by the enormity of the scene in front of me. At the same time, part of me recognized that the scope of the site, with its dozens of perfect whale skeletons, was undeniably significant—and I had an open invitation to be one of the first ones to study a place like nowhere else, as far as I knew, on the planet. It was vexing and tantalizing; it was a kind of Pandora’s box, and we’d just seen it crack open.
“I know,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
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