The Stolen Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

fossil, and let the plaster dry. Then we chisel out under the base and flip over the whole thing. We plaster the top side, and once that dries, it’s ready to make the trip back to the museum, safe in its armor. It’s called jacketing. We’ll start plastering soon, but with the drying time it won’t be ready until tomorrow. So, do you want to start with excavating or with jacketing?”
    “Excavating,” George said promptly. “That sounds more exciting.”
    “I guess I’ll try jacketing,” Bess said.
    I pondered. It was tempting to head back to camp and poke around. But what would I look for? A smart thief would simply drop the stolen fossils under a bush until he was ready to leave, and I couldn’t search the whole desert. A thief wouldn’t need any special tools, either, because they were all at the site. Maybe the best thing I could do was work, ask questions, and keep an eye on everything. “Just put me wherever you need me.”
    “Good,” Kyle said. “Bess, you can work with Steffi. They should be about ready to cover that fossil,and you couldn’t learn from a better plasterer.”
    “Sounds good.” She walked over to Steffi and Grayson.
    “What happened to Abby?” I asked.
    Kyle glanced around. “I guess she’s gone on another one of her spiritual walkabouts or whatever she calls them. The woman is useless.” He grinned at me. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be so blunt.”
    I smiled back. “That’s all right. With volunteers you have to take what you get.”
    “Too true. But Abby actually knows her fossils. She just doesn’t want to do any work. So why on earth did she bother to come?” He sighed. “In any case, why don’t you two work with Tom and Russell. Since you’re the newcomers, you can split up and pair off with them.”
    I wound up with Tom, while George worked with Russell about ten feet away. Tom said, “This was an aetosaur we call Typothorax . Aetosaurs were weird plant-eating reptiles. The bones are jumbled together, so it probably died at the edge of the river, and the water carried some bones away and dumped others here. You want to get as close to the bone as possible, but you don’t want to damage the fossil.”
    I ran my hand over a section. “How do you tell? The whole thing feels like solid stone.”
    “Well, that’s basically what a fossil is. Minerals seepinto the bones and turn them to stone. But it’s different from the surrounding area, so the rock will tend to come away.”
    I picked up a hammer and chisel. “So pound away until I find bone?”
    “Right. We’re not trying to get the bones out individually, of course. We just want to get as much rock as possible off of the top before we jacket it.”
    “Why? Wouldn’t it be safer to just plaster the whole thing?”
    “Safer, maybe, but not easier,” Tom said. “Most of these jackets weigh between fifty and two hundred pounds, and big ones will weigh more. Extra rock means extra weight.”
    I gaped at him. “But we’re a mile from the cars!”
    “Yup. It’s the fun part.” He grinned at me. “We put the heaviest jackets on a big rescue sled and drag it. But believe me, that’s no walk in the park, especially with uneven ground. And smaller fossils just go into our backpacks. Excavating is the easy part.”
    “I guess I’d better get busy, then.” I picked up a chisel and started tapping at the rock. At first I tried to be delicate, but nothing happened. I had to tap hard to break up the rock at all.
    Tom worked quickly and confidently, brushing away loose rock chips with a wide paintbrush. I thought about what he’d said. Stealing fossils wasn’tlike stealing jewelry. You had to know what you were doing to identify and retrieve valuable fossils. That meant the thief was an expert in the field.
    Could the thief even be a paleontologist? Paleontology was a lot of work, and probably didn’t pay well. “What’s it like being a paleontologist?” I asked Tom.
    “It’s the best job in the world,”