Amy Davidson

I am seated high on a steep, eroding slope overlooking the bowl of orange sand we call the Camel Humps. It's hard to keep my footing here, buffeted by gusts of sand, wind, and rain showers. Gravity is pulling down on the slope and everything on it: me, my tools, and the plaster jacket I just finished -- a white pod the size of a loaf of bread. The plaster is just a casing wrapped tightly around a disk of stone carved from this slope. Inside the stone, safe from harm now, is Guillermo's precious Deltatheridium, which we have come so far o find. It's a satisfying moment.

We have a love/hate relationship with the elements here. The wind, the rains, the sandstorms and gravity give us the fossils we find here by scouring the rock, revealing its bony inhabitants and then destroying them. The Camel Humps are a good example. This is my sixth summer working here and each time it's as if a different set of windows into the stone were opened and shut. Last summer there were so many dinosaurs along the top of this sublocality that we named it "Death Row". Now they have been collected or weathered away and instead, this little mammal skeleton has emerged from what was blank rock. We could never find these by digging blindly, so we must accept this natural paradox of revelation by destruction.

For me, to excavate a block like this is to wonder about time. What I am digging up lived and died 80 million years ago. What on earth is it doing here? It should have disintegrated to atoms millions of years before it ever arrived at this weathered surface I am standing on. What I love about collecting these specimens is the feeling of having twice cheated Nature and captured a prize which can only rightfully belong to Time and the elements. With these thoughts I shoulder my pack and slowly make my way back to camp, the specimen in my arms.

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