Jurassic Heart by Anna Martin Page A

deal? You know that right now, fewer Americans believe in global warming than they did ten years ago? And we’ve got more evidence than ever before. And fewer and fewer girls are electing to study the sciences.”
    He nodded and set the quarter spinning on the table. “I’m not denying it’s a problem,” he said slowly. “And yeah, I get involved in global warming projects and educational projects and whatever else they ask me to do.”
    “It’s just landscape,” I said and immediately regretted it.
    “See, that’s the attitude everywhere,” Joseph said, stabbing an emphatic finger at the table. “Just the desert, just the badlands, just Outer Mongolia—”
    “Actually, there’s no such place as Outer Mongolia,” I said, hoping to defuse his rant with humor. It didn’t work.
    “Whatever,” he snapped. “People don’t want to take responsibility for the world around them. We continue to build on areas of natural beauty, and they’re getting more and more scarce. We’ve done more destruction to our planet in the past century than in the preceding four billion years.”
    “So, we’ll restore,” I said. “I’ll cut the dig short by a week, and we’ll spend that time putting things back the way they were when we started.”
    He smiled cynically. “This time,” he said. “You will this time because I’m here, because I’m harassing you into doing it. But the next time you pick up a job in Mongolia or Argentina or wherever and I’m not there to put the pressure on you to do it, you won’t bother. You don’t get why it’s important.”
    “No,” I admitted. “We do what we can, but sometimes sacrifices need to be made in order to discover, to progress. I understand your viewpoint, I just don’t necessarily agree with you.”
    “Then I need to stay,” he said simply.
    I sighed. There was no reasoning with this man. “Okay,” I said. “But if you give me any hassle at all, I’m calling the cops.”
    “Same.”
    I nodded and then sipped at my rapidly cooling coffee. I wondered if the two of us would ever be able to figure it out—how to coexist without bumping up against each other. Still, this felt like an opportunity to iron out some of the problems we both had, and I wasn’t about to waste it.

Chapter 8

     
    “S O WHY don’t you dig up humans, then?” Joseph asked, leaning back in his seat.
    “I thought you objected to that too.”
    “Oh, I do,” he said. “I just want to know.”
    I shook my head. “Archaeology and paleontology are different disciplines,” I said.
    “Explain it to me.”
    I was sure he already knew, and wasn’t quite sure why he was pressing me for an answer. If it was a trap, I couldn’t see where, so I launched into an explanation.
    “For the past twelve thousand years or so, humans have developed rituals for burying their dead,” I said, then took another sip of my coffee. “Okay, some civilizations burned their dead, but most buried. And depending on all sorts of things—culture, religion, society—they did it in different ways. But nearly always, you’ll find the dead person was laid in a deep trench, on their back. The important dead were laid to rest in a box structure of some kind. This dates back thousands of years.
    “But with dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, we’re not talking about thousands of years, it’s millions . Dinosaurs didn’t bury their dead in neat little rows. They were eaten or left to the elements or simply destroyed as the continents divided and reformed in those millions of years since they died. So we can dig up human remains and apply what we know about modern humans to the skeleton and can tell how old they were when they died, if they had any diseases, what they died of. Sometimes who their family was. There’s no point of reference with prehistoric animals. I can’t dig up an Archaeopteryx and say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s go out and look at a living one of those and compare notes.’”
    “Okay,” he