Carnosaur Crimes by Christine Gentry Page B

from ancient rivers and streams covering most of Cretaceous Montana, Ansel could tell which way the water had traveled when the grains of sand and mud were deposited. Water had washed left on a bottom sandstone band, then back to the right on a middle mudstone ribbon, changing direction yet again to flow left on the topmost sandstone layer.
    It was obvious that Outerbridge was taking her to a fossil dig. She should have been excited, but other factors distracted her. She’d taken off her expensive suede vest and replaced it with the man-sized, steel-plated body armor that Outerbridge had insisted she wear, and it chafed her breasts through the thin fabric of her low-cut top.
    Protective apparel for a woman would have taken this into consideration, she thought with irritation. Given the heat, the heavy bullet-proof clothing, and the work-out her calves and thighs were getting, Ansel also promised herself to try exercising more.
    Walthers moved up behind her. “You going to make it?”
    This close, she could smell the spicy aroma of his sport cologne. “I’m fine. How much further to the mystery spot I was dragged up here to see?”
    â€œAround this curve.”
    Dixie LaPierre peered over her shoulder. “Great view from up here.”
    Ansel glanced at her. It was the first time that Dixie had really talked, though she’d given her a quick smile and “Hello” before they started the climb thirty feet below.
    Before she could respond, silent heat lightening flashed, and Ansel looked over the trail edge into the flat prairie expanse beneath them. A hot breeze, tainted with the scent of sagebrush, scrub, and wild grasses blew into her face. The bluff was one of many that rose above the earth’s dirty skin like a cauliflower wart made of white, micaceous sandstone. The gravid moon spilled beams across the ground in milky splotches, illuminating a pitted crossbed of calcareous, cement-like sandstone pillars resembling sharp stalagmites or giant, toadstool caps.
    Above the trail a Ponderosa copse clung precariously to the highest elevations, and stars glimmered in an inky sky-pool. Miles away a coyote howled a moon-song across the Badlands. As beautiful as it was, a fall from this height into the maw of boulders and pillars could kill her.
    Silence prevailed until they reached a flat shelf on the eastern face of the precipice. The bulldozer had gouged deep into the bluff’s underbelly, pushing flora, soil, and rock away from an excavated fossil site. Once hidden beneath tons of sixty-five-million year old mud and sand, an exposed bed of gigantic dinosaur bones lay across the ground. Ansel looked upon an excavation site ringed by rechargeable, lantern-style halogens.
    â€œJesus,” she exclaimed, shocked and disbelieving. This was no carefully tended scientific site preserving matrix, fossils, and ecological microsites. This was a grave looting frenzy.
    â€œNice work, huh?” said Outerbridge, hands on his hips. “Poachers on a mission, Miss Phoenix. This used to be the near complete skeleton of an adult female T-Rex that the University of Montana had excavated for two years. Everything was carefully removed from the ground, catalogued, and jacketed in plaster this spring. Then it was re-covered with dirt so it could be removed next spring. Unfortunately, poachers got to it first.”
    Ansel stepped through a litter of busted plaster jackets spewing huge broken, brown-grey bones of all sizes and descriptions. The containers resembled monstrous, hatched eggs. Fossil ribs once as tall as she were now reduced to fractured, oblong chunks. There were smashed vertebrae the size of footballs everywhere. Crushed arm bones and leg bones. Pelvic bones pulverized into dust. Everything ruined by a succession of treaded backhoe ruts and tractor treads as the plunderers hauled choice pieces away for sale at a humongous profit.
    â€œI don’t see the skull,” Ansel