Guitierrez smiled. After all these years, Levine had not changed at all. He was still one of the most brilliant and irritating men in science. The two had been fellow graduate Students at Yale, until Levine quit the doctoral program to get his degree in comparative zoology instead. Levine announced he had no interest in the kind of contemporary field research that so attracted Guitierrez. With characteristic contempt, he had once described Guitierrez’s work as “collecting parrot crap from around the world.”
The truth was that Levine – brilliant and fastidious – was drawn to the past, to the world that no longer existed. And he studied this world with obsessive intensity. He was famous for his photographic memory, his arrogance, his sharp tongue, and the unconcealed pleasure he took in pointing out the errors of colleagues. As a colleague once said, “Levine never forgets a bone – and he never lets you forget it, either.”
Field researchers disliked Levine, and he returned the sentiment. He was at heart a man of detail, a cataloguer of animal life, and he was happiest poring over museum collections, reassigning species, rearranging display skeletons. He disliked the dust and inconvenience of life in the field. Given his choice, Levine would never leave the Museum. But it was his fate to live in the greatest period of discovery in the history of paleontology. The number of known species of dinosaurs had doubled in the last twenty years, and new species were now being described at the rate of one every seven weeks, Thus Levine’s worldwide reputation forced him to continually travel around the World, inspecting new finds, and rendering his expert opinion to researchers who were annoyed to admit that they needed it.
“Where’d you come from?” Gtiitierrez asked him.
“Mongolia,” Levine said. “I was at the Flaming Cliffs, in the Gobi Desert, three hours out of Ulan Bator.”
“Oh? What’s there?”
“John Roxton’s got a dig. He found an incomplete skeleton he thought might be a new species of Velociraptor, and wanted me to have a look.”
“And?”
Levine shrugged. “Roxton never really did know anatomy, He’s an enthusiastic fund-raiser, but if he actually uncovers something, he’s incompetent to proceed.”
“You told him that?”
“Why not? It’s the truth.”
“And the skeleton?”
“The skeleton wasn’t a raptor at all,” Levine said. “Metatarsals all wrong, pubis too ventral, ischium lacking a proper obturator, and the long bones much too light. As for the skull….” He rolled his eyes. “The palatal’s too thick, antorbital fenestrae too rostra], distal carida too small – oh, it goes on and on. And the trenchant ungual’s hardly present. So there we are. I don’t know what Roxton could have been thinking. I suspect he actually has a subspecies of Stenonychosaurus, though I haven’t decided for sure.”
“Stenonychosaurus?” Guitierrez said.
“Small Triassic carnivore – two meters from pes to acetabtiltim. In point of fact, a rather ordinary theropod. And Roxton’s find wasn’t a particularly interesting example. Although there was one curious detail. The material included an integtimental artifact – an imprint of the dinosaur’s skin. That in itself is not rare. There are perhaps a dozen good skin impressions obtained so far, mostly among the Hadrosauridae. But nothing like this. Because it was clear to me that this animal’s skin had some very unusual characteristics not previously suspected in dinosaurs – ”
“Señores,” the pilot said, interrupting them, “Juan Fernández Bay is ahead.”
Levine said, “Circle it first, can we?”
Levine looked out the window, his expression intense again, the conversation forgotten. They were flying over jungle that extended up into the hills for miles, as far as they could see. The helicopter banked, circling the beach.
“There it is now,” Guitierrez said, pointing out the window.
The beach was a clean, curving white crescent, entirely deserted in the afternoon light. To the south, they saw a single dark mass in the sand. From the air, it looked like a rock, or perhaps a large clump of seaweed. The shape was amorphous, about five feet across. There were lots of footprints around it.
“Who’s been here?” Levine said, with a sigh.
“Public Health Service people came out earlier today.”
“Did they do anything?” he said. “They touch it, disturb it in any way?