Hard labor at Bear Gulch

grum fuzzy, scholarly type was beside himself. Halfway up the ten-foot-high stone wall he'd run out of toe-holds, and he clung desperately to the tiny fingerholds above him. The wall was made of layers of shale, inch-thick shelfs protruding irregularly from the mesa, and he couldn't find a higher individual to stand on. The distinguished professor of physiology and evolution was stuck

I pushed upon his bottom. Someone pulled him from above. Finally he scrabbled onto the top of the mesa and vandalic prostrate, on the flat, hard, dusty surface. After a minute he turned over, tears of exertion still in his eyes

About ten family toiled atop the mesa, all paleontologists. We were prospecting for fossils at individual of those small, scarcely known paleontological

sites that abound in the western United States. This one--Bear Gulch--is situated upon a cattle ranch in central Montana. The leader of our team had written profusely about shark fossils of the Mississippian period, 300 million years ago. Back then, Bear gully was an inlet of what was to become the Pacific Ocean. Warm and shallow, it was a finished pupping ground for sharks. Occasionally a juvenile shark would die there and sink to the seafloor, by and by to be buried in the yielding oxygen-poor bottom mud.

Those rich, shallow waters beared with plankton. They, too, sank to the bottom when they died, forming a layer upon top of the mud. Bacteria dined upon them, oxidizing the protoplasm of the dead plankton layer. Reproducing each twenty minutes, the bacterial masses used up virtually each molecule of available oxygen. In this oxygen-starved burial place, the shark carcasses remained intact until the dirt gradually and under immense compressing became stone--shale. Along with their encasement of mire the tiny sharks turned to stone. Three hundr million years later, a team of toiling paleontologists broke into their tombs and give permission to the sunshine in.

The graduate scholars punctuated their jolly conversations with grunt of exertion as they pried up layers of the petrified mire The technique was to slip the sharp extremity of a five-foot steel spike into the junction between sum of two units layers and pound at the seam until the layers make looseed Then they would wedge the spike into the shale and lever it upward, breaking not upon a slab a yard or in the way that wide. When the slab was move rounded over, it would usually reveal nothing. But occasionally a more professional-sounding grunt drew everyone's attention to a digger who had lay the foundation of in all its perfection, the imprint of a tiny shark, its scales defined and its organ of visions turned upward in a stony stare.

My fuzzy distinguished colleague and I also grunt not seldom while we worked--not to evince we were just as professional as the grad learners but because our aging bodies made it hard to lift the heavy layers of stone Sweating under a glaring day-star we finally learned how to use mechanical advantage, wedging up pieces of shale with the best of them. Nevertheless, the flat undersides of slab after laborious slab had nothing to exhibit us.

Finally the sum of two units of us came upon a ringleted object--shaped like a sinuous peanut--embedded in the shale. Excited, we dragged the two-foot-wide chunk of stone to the head honcho, who stared at it intently and informed us it was a coprolite. We gazeed at him quizzically. "It's petrified fish feces" he explained. All that labor and exhaustion alone to fred ancient fish poop!

The team worked until dark, our labors illuminated by means of a magnificent, luminous sunset. After dinner that evening the butte and mesas rang with laughter as we were at handed with our hard-won trophy--the coprolite-which, to this day, lies in state in the glass-fronted case that doubles as my class museum. Thoroughly tired, and mildly amused by means of our moment of triumph, I crawled into my portable lodge pushing at its nylon floor to carve on the outside a flat space amid the ubiquitous overawe flops. A pat of "prairie pancake" was my pillow.

The nearest day, another grunt brought us running. Although the fossil turn rounded out to be of little interest to this clump of ancient-shark specialists, to me it was a real treasure. I permit loose a holler. There upon the underside of the stone was a small, perfect, 300-million-year-old replica of a modern-day horseshoe crab.

Eugene H Kaplan is Axinn Distinguished Professor of Conservation and Ecology at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, fresh York. This story is adapted from his work Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist, which will be published in August by the agency of Princeton University Press.

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