Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 5
Dinosaurs Down Underground
Discovering a Digging Dinosaur
Big surprises often arrive in small packages; in this instance, it was in an e-mail
message. On August 26, 2005, while preparing to teach my first classes of a new
semester, I was glad to see the message from my friend Dave Varricchio. Although
we had known each other since 1985, chatted in person at professional meetings,
and had kept in touch via e-mail, at best we got together only once a year and our
exchanges were infrequent. This seemingly unsocial behavior was not because we
were less cordial with one another, but instead could be attributed to distance, time,
and personal demands. Dave was busy earning tenure in his assistant-professor po-
sition at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, while also serving as a
staff paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies there. Meanwhile, I was at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, having just finished rewriting the latest edition of a
dinosaur textbook and teaching full-time.
The longest span of time we had spent together since our graduate-school
days—which was in the late 1980s—was a week of field work in northwestern
Montanain2000.Whilethere,heandItookacloselookattheLateCretaceousfossil
insect cocoons and burrows near the
Troodon
nest sites. Yet the resulting research
paper from that investigation was dormant and nowhere near ready for submitting to
a journal. So what could be the purpose of his message?
The message subject gave me no clue whatsoever. It simply said “specimen.”
Dave's message text was similarly cryptic, albeit enlivened by an injection of Freu-
dian humor:
