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faces of egg layer 4. Busy days like these pass quickly, and we needed
some rest and relaxation. Luckily, our hosts at the village had some-
thing in mind.
The morning of March 25 started early, with whinnies, sounds of
bells, dogs barking, and a lot of other commotion. We soon learned
that more than twenty gauchos were expected to be on hand to
brand and break a hundred horses. We figured that a good way of
resting would be to watch an Argentine rodeo, and indeed it was. The
morning activities started with branding horses; gauchos would work
in teams of five or six, each on foot with a lasso and assisted by a
horseman. They would select a colt or a young horse, lasso it, and
mark its thigh with an incandescent iron, also managing to drink a lot
of wine and beer during their breaks under the blistering sun. By
lunchtime, most of the gauchos were drunk, but they kept working
nevertheless. Lunch consisted of a roasted horse, plus more wine
and beer. In the afternoon, with our bellies full of horsemeat and
drinks, we sat in the shade to watch the continuing gaucho games.
Occasionally, some courageous gauchos would attempt to break the
wild horses, almost inevitably ending up on the ground. Toward
evening, we headed back to our camp to prepare dinner and take care
of our domestic chores. Even after dark, however, we kept hearing the
gauchos' laughter and a pitched neigh or two.
This wonderful feast was a kind of farewell party. In the days that
followed we started wrapping up our tasks and getting ready to return
home. The wind blew mercilessly on March 26, but short of time, we
persevered. The four-week season had provided us with a lot of new
information. We had discovered the first adult dinosaurs in the egg
layers, and we thought that some of them might represent species pre-
viously unknown to science. Many more eggs and egg clutches had
been mapped. More embryos had been collected. The first nest struc-
tures of sauropod dinosaurs had been found. We had confirmed our
initial thoughts about the ancient climatic conditions of the nesting
site. And we had garnered glimpses of a colossal meat-eating dinosaur
that would have dwarfed the already fearsome
Aucasaurus.
It had been
a successful expedition, and we were sad to go. Yet we knew that a host
of analyses and important discoveries awaited us at home, and that we
would certainly return.
As we left, clouds surrounded the ancient volcano that for three sea-
