Death by Dinosaur: Natural History Mystery, #1

By Catherine M Mullins

Paleontologist Collette Hillyard loves excavating fossils of ancient beasts more than anything in the world. And in the volcanic canyons just below Death Valley, California, she plans to do just that.

But what she finds on this dig with the Southern California Natural History Museum will change her life forever. For better...and for worse.

Take a journey to worlds long-gone-by with this puzzle mystery that spans millions of years of history. Find out why murder has never been so prehistoric.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Catherine Mullins
• Release date: May 30, 2025
• ISBN: 9798986452760

Catherine M Mullins

If the boonies had boonies, Catherine Mullins' hometown would be it. Luckily, the advantage of living out in the middle of nowhere is there is so little to do, there's lots of time to write. And so she uses it to write loooooong novels. For more information about her tomes (and the ones that by some miracle are actually pretty short.) see her website.  

Book preview

Chapter 1

Friday May 20, 2022

Collette pushed the pearls of sweat from her forehead with a sun-burnt hand and adjusted her worn, good-luck LA Glover’s baseball hat, allowing a touch of breeze beneath her hot helmet of torture.  The first breeze of the day. And gosh, was it ever time for one. The lake of perspiration that sat pooled and near boiling on the very top of her head cooled to a more bearable temperature as the light gust of air was let in beneath the old, worn and water-stained white-and-red cap. She wore this cap only on special digs. And this was a very special dig.

Collette couldn’t leave her hat loose for long, though. She needed every ounce of protection she could get from the blaring sun that seemed somehow whiter, hotter, and closer to the groundout here just outside of Death Valley.  Her ivory scalp required the shade, and her over-educated brain the preservation from the sun’s direct rays, despite the fact that a head covering seemed counter-intuitive. Her body told her to remove layers covering her skin, to let air in, but Collette knew her body’s request was unwise. What she really needed was to cover up that skin in order to preserve it from the scorching sun, and to welcome the sweat that wearing extra layers caused. So, she tightened the snap-back on her head gear that was from her early teen years in the late ‘90s, and went back to staring at the same spot on the ground she had been staring at for the past hour.

Gosh, she had to take a break from this perpetual glaring downwards soon, though.  The sweat from her forehead was finding its way down her ski-sloped, Polish nose and onto the ash-filled earth beneath her despite her wiping the drops with the side of her hand every five minutes.  Soon, the damp soil, or rather ash-laden dust beneath her, and the mineral-laden root cast she was digging around would be sopping wet if she didn’t.

And that would be a tragedy...to damage her opportunity of being the first one to find a fossil, or even worse, damage an actual fossil hidden in this strange ground. On most digs Collette had done in college and her earlier career, the earth was either complete sand or hardened rock, but this mineral-infused volcanic sediment, sparkling in pinks, reds, and bright whites, dazzled her and shone so brightly in the sun it was hard to see the root cast, a sparkly, mineral-laden filler of the furrows a root had once made in the ground.

It was hard to imagine that this hard, silica-bearing mineral was once something living, that the gravelly sediment below her had once been rich, brown soil giving rise to towering redwood trees and lush green ferns. Yes, a million years had worked magic—or perhaps the opposite of magic. It had turned brilliant verdure covering a marshy swamp inhabited by saber tooth tigers—Smilodon Californicus—and gompiphers, smaller versions of the mammoths, into a habitat good only for a few crooked Joshua trees extending their spiked arms up to the sun in supplication for mercy, and dry, brittle tumble weeds rolling along with occasional breezes—warning of what happened to all living things who didn’t get enough water.

Collette widened her nostrils and tried to imagine the smell of lush, green mosses and ferns drinking their fill of the wet earth with giant redwood sentinels rising up to the sky here and there. She imagined the scent of wild animal—the Megafauna—woolly mammoths, giant sloths, bone-crushing dogs that made today’s wolves look like puppies, and dire bears that could eat a grizzly for lunch.

What would it have been like to step into such a setting? To feel the swampy water beneath her toes, to feel the cool air, to see a forest instead of sand and stone? It would have been beautiful, and yet, as she looked up from the sand below her, and out onto the horizon, she was glad she was here now. As glorious as redwood forests and life-filled swamps were, she doubted they could compare to the surreal beauty of the landscape before her. No hyper carnivore, no dire wolf or Smilodon Californicus, would have looked out at anything this...well, this amazing.

Collette adjusted her hat again and wiped another drop of perspiration that had swum down the length of her slightly sunburned nose again, and also, again, was threatening to dive off the tip of it. She was the lucky one to be living now and looking out to her right at a field of magnificent-but-eerie lava deposits, with their pillows and spirals of smooth, black, hardened basalt containing thin, wiry strands of glass gleaming in the sun.

Those black lakes of stone dared visitors to stand on top of them—-on top of what had once been 1,000-degree molten rock, and to take photos as if what was under their feet was a mere stone instead of the once-frothing, bellowing wrath of a volcano. Just looking at the lava beds with their silent black fury and tales of a seething monster brought Collette the same sense of excitement she got from being on top of a roller coaster—the feeling of being in danger yet knowing you were safe. When none of her colleagues was looking, she would go over and run her hand over the mafic stone, allowing her hands to slide over the cool, smooth places and get roughed by the more porous pumice-like rocks enclosed in the flow. How her fellow professors would have made fun of her if they knew about her obsession with rocks, though, secretly, she suspected that most of them experienced the same thing when they saw beautiful rocks that she did—an almost spiritual feeling, a feeling of such childlike wonder she wanted to cry at times. Rocks were beautiful but also stable. So few things had been stable in Colette’s life that, rocks, particularly fossils, gems and minerals had represented to her the lastingness that she missed.

But that was only one sight to see in this magnificent desert of wonders. To her left, stood the real gods of the desert—the thing which drove millions of tourists and adventure seekers to Fire Rock Canyon each year. Giant formations of ash and stone that towered hundreds of feet tall stood like giant cathedrals of rock against a sky so blue sapphires couldn’t compare to it. But not just any stone composed these cathedrals. Rainbows of reds, oranges, purples and even blues in some lights shone on these titan formations of ash that bulged and wound into spires on top, and weird and wild shapes beneath—shapes that created scenes of people, things, and animals frozen in stone.

Yes, Colette could stare forever at those formations that looked like the creation of some mad giant who wished to make beauty but knew only chaos. These Martian mountains that outshone anything a foreign planet could possibly offer stood forlorn and full of secrets inviting Colette to explore them. Yet she knew she dare not. If she spent too much time exploring the formations, she might never be able to stop. The seduction was that strong.

In fact, Colette couldn’t allow her eyes to stare too long at these sirens of the sand to her left now. Instead, she looked out straight in front of her at the beauty there—the beauty which fit in with the strange sights around her, yet remained entirely different.  The beauty of the gold and white glittering dunes of sediment that held the remains of the ancient animals she sought.

Just then, Collette realized how good it was to be looking up instead of down. She hadn’t felt the pain of her position earlier, but now that she was taking a break from craning over the ground, she felt an intense throbbing in her trapezius and semispinalis capitis muscles. Lifting her sunbaked, delicate hand to massage her neck, Collette let out a slight grown. Man, she had been so involved in displacing the sediment from around a root cast at her feet that had seemed a promising area to find fossils, that she had been impervious to the pain this intense looking caused. Now, though, between the ache and the imperious heat, her body was demanding she pay attention to it.

Collette removed the sweaty, red palms of her hands from her neck and placed them on her lower back. Oof. Stretch. She moved her back backwards and her neck towards the sun, cracking her joints with such a thunderous sound it seemed to echo across the dunes. She noticed, as she raised her head to crack and pop her neck once more, the Sierra Nevada that stood far past the formations, grey and purple against the turquoise sky. Collette had never been up in those mountains much. From this side, they were almost as dry and barren as the desert in places, but someday she’d go. Even if it was just for a day’s hike. Her goal now, though, after digging, would be to allow herself a moment to explore those ash and stone formations that called to her from her left. Surely an hour or so doing that wouldn’t be dangerous, would it?

Collette had roamed last night among those towers and other smaller ones like them that twisted into eerie shapes by ages of erosion. A coven of stone witches with pointy hats of ash peaking towards the sky stoked the flames and stirred a wicked caldron of rock, while great leaping frogs, long-legged gazelles, and a huntsman with a prize deer on his back also emerged around the witches as effigies in the stone.

Of course, these shapes in the rock were all open to interpretation. Collette’s colleague could see her witches with their cauldron, but refused to acknowledge that the tall, hunched formation she had called a huntsman was such. Instead, her paleontologist colleague, John Freeman had seen a tree with a giant knot on one side and two long roots below it in her huntsman’s space.

Preposterous. Anybody with eyes should interpret the long parts as legs, not roots, and the humped part as an animal, not a knot. Collette smiled to herself now as she turned her head back around to face forward and moved her hands from her back to the straw on the canvas-and-vinyl Gooseneck water bladder—the best thing she had ever purchased for camping—as she remembered her and John’s ridiculous banter the night before. And now as the cool, almost-metallic tasting water pouring down her throat from her sips on the bladder’s straw and cooled her whole body now, she stifled a giggle at the thought of John’s faux-insistence on his ideas about the shapes in the rock formation.

It was too bad John Freeman was engaged. A stalwart football-quarterback-build type guy, he had taken her breath away when she met him at the Southern California Natural History Museum in preparation for the dig. And it hadn’t been just his build that blew her away either. Those silver-blue eyes that seemed to stare into the depths of her soul and greeted her own green orbs with just a hint of mischief as well as attraction could have made her swoon if she weren’t practiced at keeping a hold of herself.

On, second thought, though, it was probably a good thing he was engaged. Collette had known the moment she laid eyes on him, that handsome as he was, John Freeman was a real trouble maker, as so many good-looking men are. Yes, Colette had learned after long years of trial and error to stay away from the really hunky-looking males of the human species. They ALL, and she meant ALL had an ego, and more likely than not, couldn’t resist cheating, if not physically, then emotionally with whomever they found a bit prettier than their current partner.

Collette, to her chagrin, had found herself more often than not being the less attractive current partner to these overly-handsome men. She really couldn’t blame men for looking at women whose figures were a bit slenderer than hers, their eyes a more flattering shade of green, their jawbones a bit more angular, or their chins, more rounded. Not that she wasn’t a looker. With the right shade of lipstick and a shorter skirt, she could stop traffic, but gentlemen, at least the kind that John Freeman represented often preferred blondes, and Collette Hillyard refused to condescend to dying her hair that honey wheat color just to please the opposite sex. No, if a man was going to be attracted to her, it would be for her own autumnal beauty, not some asset that came from a bottle. So, when a man started flirting with a golden-haired siren who was a bit more attractive than Colette it was over.  And this ignoring of her for someone else had happened to her way too many times when she was with a stud for her to ever want to date one again.  John included.

But John’s absence from his girlfriend while on a three-week dig might prove a bit tricky for him and for Collette, if she was to stick to her principles. At least, judging from the way he had been looking at her over the campfire last night, it might.

So how did you get here? he had asked as the sweet smell of the burning birch in the campfire wafted into Collette’s nose. The scent was so strong, it had almost made her cough. But that was how she liked it. Smoke so heavy you could almost taste its bold, mesquite flavor.

Um, in my car...? she had responded to John knowing full well that wasn’t what he had meant.

A flicker of amusement and admiration sparked in John’s eyes. He knew her game. But he was playing it cool.

No, I mean how did you get to be on this dig as a senior paleontologist, he asked, the left side of his bottom lip upturning into a smile almost imperceptibly.

Now that was a long story involving friendships with multiple professors, playing smart, playing dumb, jumping through hoops, contorting the truth and making sure she took all the right, and only the right opportunities. This, of course, was on top of the obligatory acing of every class she ever took, double majors and truckloads of money or debt—however you wanted to look at it. But anyone could be super-smart and burn wads of cash. What really made you a successful, or even a just-barely-in-work paleontologist, was politics.

I went to Yale, Collette replied. There was no need to give away all of her secrets...not just yet—anyway. Then I interned in China for a couple of years. By that she meant she had spent eight hours a day at a dig in Kunming bringing water to and from a pump truck off site to all the doctors in paleontology actually digging out in the field.

The sweet irony of it was she wasn’t sure whose work was more unappreciated and futile—her attempt to hydrate the seniors in her discipline as they assaulted the earth furiously from a ridiculously high and dry altitude, or the doctors’ attempt to salvage bones the proper way before mammoth construction companies excavating building sites discovered the precious fossils and sold them on the black market.  What those construction companies did to the senior paleontologists was almost payback for her slavery to see the mainly male scientists struggle and toil over a single bone knowing full well that a construction company would most likely unearth the rest of the skeleton haphazardly the next month in a single day and sell it to a collector who could care less about the priceless information the skeleton could give to science.

But it wasn’t quite payback. At her heart, Collette was a true anthropologist, devastated by the incalculable loss to science a fossil stolen from its provenance was. Thus, as much as she disdained being a glorified water pump, she couldn’t help feel horrible about what the PhDs were up against.  The mere thought of losing possibly the only specimen of an entire species, or the last bone to a complete skeleton, or worse, the only precious clue needed to solve an eons-old mystery, made her physically ill. And yet, also true to her anthropologist spirit, she felt sorry for the majority of fossil-thieves.

Yes, the rich heads of the construction companies that stole a number of the finds were evil, but it was the poor Chinese peasants, many of whose families were on the verge of starvation in the country, or dwelling in homes in Beijing the size of an American bathroom, who offed with most of the invaluable treasures preserved in the soil from ages past and made a little extra cash from their sale. At this latter caste of people, it was hard to be too infuriated. She couldn’t imagine living in the conditions they did, or facing back-breaking labor eighty hours a week just to barely keep their children’s mouths fed. As much as she mourned the loss to the body of human knowledge these stolen specimens represented, she also mourned for the people too.  Yes, her time in China had shown her the vicious war between human poverty and man’s potential for greatness, and this sight had left its scars on Collette, like half of her other experiences in this field.

Nǐ huì shuō zhōngwén ma? John asked.

Once upon a time I spoke Chinese, Collette replied to John’s question about whether she spoke Mandarin or not. "I don’t really speak it anymore. Quite happy if I never hear it again, actually.

Mmm, said John, taking a sip of black-bean chili. Not a great experience?

Collette felt her mouth water. What she wouldn’t give for some of that spicy beef and beans the chuck wagon had cooked up. Dumb men! They could eat whatever they wanted to and not have it show, while, she, with her figure and its propensity to gain an inch with the taste of a single French fry, had to half-starve herself on vegetables and water.

At least she was lucky to have fresh vegetables for the first week of her dig. Because children had been invited through the Young-Dinosaur-Hunter program at the Museum for the first week, a caterer had been hired to actually cook meals. After this, though, everyone on the team would take a turn in a sparse camper kitchen to prepare half-cooked dinners with cheap ingredients on the verge of spoiling.

Begrudging John his beefy meal, Collette sipped her hot green tea and replied "It wasn’t the best part of my academic career. What about you? How do you know Mandarin?

I’ve been around, John replied.

Oh, wasn’t he just so coy? What kind of a response was that?

Actually, my great grandfather lived in China after World War II, John said. He taught me a couple useful phrases... you know, Do you speak Mandarin? Please pass the saki, and Is there a toilet?" That sort of thing.

Collette gave a more-than-courtesy laugh.

And what about what brought you here? Collette asked. Are you in a doctorate program?

Yeah. Los Angeles University, he replied between bites.

That wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good either. But if he played his cards right, he might end up in a lab doing what Michael Chrichton had called being a tea-cup paleontologist, studying and cataloguing bone fragments and putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. He better have fun on his internship digs, though. They might be the only time he got out in the field.

Wow, Collette said, Los Angeles University is fantastic.

She wasn’t sure why she said this. If it was just because he was hot, and her natural tendency to flatter when she flirted (flart?) was getting the better of her, or if her positive personality and need to bring people up was coming out. Either way, it was a lie.

You don’t think it’s a good enough school, John said, a smirk tweaking his upper lip again.

My tone was less enthusiastic than I thought it was, huh? said Collette, feeling more than a little surprised.

Let’s just say I can smell B.S. a mile away. This time John’s smirk morphed into a full-fledged grin, and his eyes sparkled with pleasure at having found her out.

Collette felt a tingle go down her spine. Yes, he would be a very hard one to resist.

But that had all been last night. Today was far less sexy with the sun beating down so hard on the desert floor that Collette could feel her cotton underwear soaking from perspiration. A strange rank odor began presenting itself as well. Had she slathered on enough Murphy’s all-natural deodorant today?

There was no point in worrying now. At the center of a crowd of children and their parents, and in front of her esteemed colleagues including a guest doctor from Argentina, she couldn’t just swipe out her handy-dandy biodegradable plastic Murphy’s container from her teal fanny pack and start rolling it conspicuously on her perfectly shaved armpits. That would be tacky. And embarrassing. Instead, Collette automatically reached for the straw to her Gooseneck water bladder. Collette took a drink of the cool mineral-and-slightly-plastic flavored water, and let it gush down her throat. The relief that filled her whole body threatened to engulf her common sense. She had to hold herself back from guzzling the entire two-liter contents of her pack. It was easy to use a water supply too quickly in the heat, and hers was already running low. And it wasn’t even noon yet. The hottest part of the day was yet to come.

Hey, guys, I think I found something! came the small, shrill voice of a child a few yards away sheltering in a shadowy nook in a five-foot-high mound of red dirt a few feet to her right.

Everyone’s head in the group immediately looked up from whatever rock, pebble, or root cast they had been pondering in their feverish attempts to find a fossil.

Bring it over here, said Dr. Maven kindly.

The old man teetered so far forward due to a hump on his back that he looked perpetually like he was about to fall over his toes. But the withered face, with its wrinkles so deep they could have been sewn in him at birth gave off a kindness that quickly changed any wary look on a child’s face to a smile.

A boy who looked like he was probably in fourth grade and wearing what could only be some mother’s idea of a Victorian safari outfit complete with a Dr.-Livingston-type hat, sprang from his crouch the way a surfer would pop up on a board, and cautiously stomped his way across the soft, pink, white and red ground to the old man.

You wouldn’t have been able to tell from the old man’s khaki shorts or loose cotton polo shirt billowing in the breeze, that the old professor, with his hunch and shock of white hair, Dr. Maven, was Chair of the Paleontology Department at the Southern California History Museum and head curator there, or that he had spent twenty years teaching at Yale. Instead, in his informal gear, he looked more like he would be at home on the golf course. In fact, it was hard for Collette not to automatically see nine irons and wooden putters in a caddy besides him.

But head paleontologist on the dig Dr. Maven was, and the bold, young boy plodding towards him in the Dr. Livingston hat didn’t hesitate to step up to the folded-over elderly man and present him with his treasure.

My gosh, said the professor removing the small, slim spectacles from a pair of deep, grey eyes to take a closer look at the fist-(adult fist)-sized rock the boy had handed to him.

The ears of all thirty-seven people in the group—crumb crunchers and bored tired adults who had been dragged to this real dinosaur dig by their children—immediately pricked.

A tall, skinny, youngish man in designer Carlton T-shirt and jeans with a look so intense on his face it might have burned a hole in a rock crept closer to the Professor from behind, while a fifty-something woman in too-tight shorts looking like she was about to die from heat exhaustion took Mr. Designer Jeans’ cue and gathered a little closer as well.

From then on, there was no stopping it, each member of the diverse group of fossil hunters, one by one, crowded in a little closer to see what the child had found.

I’ve never seen anything like this before! cried Dr. Maven with profundity and a look of utter seriousness.

Mr. Designer Jeans inched even closer, the look of intensity on his face growing.

Collette’s eyebrows rose till they nearly touched her scalp.

The three children next to Colette whispered to each other in hushed tones.

Why... cried Dr. Maven with great excitement and earnestness, ...it’s a rock!

Collette felt a smile crack in the parched sides of her mouth that created what was the faintest trace of the first and only wrinkle on her face.

Mr. Designer Jeans’ solemn expression became one of shock that quickly crumbled into disgust.

The little boy in the Dr. Livingston hat’s face turned bright red and a frown appeared on it.

He...he...he, a laugh broke out from the woman in the too-tight shorts, her red cheeks swelling with mirth.  Then, like the wave in a giant stadium, the laughter spread through the crowd. The PhDs and parents alike began chuckling. Collette and the three children a few feet from her burst out with laughter as well.

The little boy who had handed in his special prize to old Professor Maven looked at the men and women around him with embarrassment. No one liked being laughed at, especially children. But suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the silliness of Dr. Maven’s joke hit the child, and instead of being laughed at, he seemed to decide he was being laughed with. Suddenly, as if he couldn’t help it, the little boy’s frown turned upside down into a smile, and a fit of laughter seized him too. His face, no longer red with embarrassment, turned towards Dr. Maven’s teasing eyes, and a look of kindred mirth shot through the boy’s own big, brown orbs. These grown-up scientists had a sense of humor after all.

I’m just teasing you, said Dr. Maven with a glimmer in his squinting eyes as he bent down to be even closer to the pint-sized paleontologist in the ridiculous-looking safari hat. 

"This is actually a really great find. What you picked off the ground and handed to me here, my friend, is actually the knee bone of a three-toed camel, a Camelops Hesternus.  Here, the old man turned to the crowd and raised his voice, We have our first official prehistoric mammal find of the day!"

The boy’s smiling face turned into a beaming one, as he accepted a pat on the head from the scientist he idolized, and a woman with red hair and more freckles than plain, white skin on her face began to applaud.

Go, Benny! she cried.

Collette smiled harder but tried not to role her eyes. You could always tell the mothers in these groups of children. The way they cheered at any sort of small accomplishment, you would think their child had just been the first person to land on Mars.

The woman with her butt cheeks molded to her too-short jean shorts joined in the clapping. And just as the group had been subject to a contagious bout of laughter a few moments earlier, it quickly, with the exception of Mr. Designer Jeans and a couple other more jealous-looking children, joined in the applause.

Whoohoo! cried one particularly dramatic kid in a Cretaceous Land T-shirt.

I think this deserves a piece of candy, said Dr. Maven, pulling out a hard cinnamon twist from his jeans and passing it to the little boy. 

These were some of the best parts of a dig in a way. Of course, Collette’s favorite parts were when something poking up from the ground took shape to her own eyes, and she, herself, felt the thrill of discovery. At those times, the adrenaline burst as she dug the piece of a long-lost ancient world out with her hands made her feel like she was flying super-hero-style, free and wild through the air.  And the thrill of brushing away the details of a giant find with a close colleague, watching the monster beneath the soil slowly reveal itself to them for the first time in eons was a close second. But the moment when a whole group of paleontologists—those with PhDs, and those with third grade science certificates—coalesced to celebrate a discovery had to come somewhere in between.

Maybe we should all start looking in that mound for the rest of the camel, Collette heard herself pipe up. As glad as she had been for the little boy discovering the first specimen, she couldn’t help but feel the push to find more begin to fuel her being.

Collette stood up and stepped quickly, trying to hide the urge to run at top speed towards the mound. The race had begun, the Indianapolis of paleontology, the drive to find the first bone's compatriots, maybe even the entire rest of the skeleton, or more and even better finds—Smilodon Californicus (saber tooth-tiger) teeth, Megalonyx leptostomus (giant sloth) toes, or Hippideon (early horse) skulls.  Or, and Collette held her breath at the very thought of it, the holy grail of a paleontologist's career—a new species. A bone or a skull or a skeleton that didn't quite fit into the known taxonomic classification. Something no one had ever seen before. Something that would truly add to the vast book of knowledge on the prehistoric. And vainly, something that might even get named after her. Not that anything truly unfound existed in these sandy hills.  All the early paleontologists had found the major species, camels, dogs, tapirs, rats, lizards, rhinos, cats, deer, horses, bears, and various crosses in between, but there was always the hope that one could find a new sub-species, some branch that didn't fit on the average evolutionary tree—some new link between two other known species.  

Colette could no longer feel the sweat pouring down her neck or smell her, and several of the men's body odors wafting through the dry desert air. All she could sense was prospect, possibility, potential.  A bloodhound hot on the trail of an escaped convict was an unmotivated snail in comparison with Collette now. Bone. What she needed now more than water, more than breath, more than any darn sense of community was bone. And preferably bone connected to other bone. 

What would be the best thing, was finding the rest of the camel. Entire legs of a prehistoric species, much less entire skeletons were as hard to find as the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Earthquakes, floods, mudslides, and the general movement of time and land tore skeletal remains apart, reburying the various pieces of the puzzle in different locations, flattening them till they were so distorted they hardly looked like animal remains, or disintegrating them completely, so that it was very rare to find an entire animal whose body remained intact. 

But nonetheless, these skeletons were out there. And the potential for this knee bone to belong to the rest of an entire skeleton waiting to be found in that red mound was also there.

Dr. Hillyard, is this a bone? came a tiny voice from someone so short Collette wasn't sure where to look at first.

Argh! Her forward momentum had been ruined. She wouldn't be the first to make it back to the mound the boy had found the camel knee in. She had to stop right here and take the time to answer this little monster's question.

Not that Collette disliked children. In fact, she loved them. She had practically raised her little brother, and had loved every minute of it. And it always felt like a treat when kids could join them on the dig. Their fascination and passion made some of the complaining undergrad interns look like ingrates. But right now, she wanted to get to that sight, and this little bugger, er cutey, was in her way.

Collette swallowed the sigh rising up in her throat and beat down the frustrated look on her face into one of more patience. She, then, bent down to look at what the little girl in pig tails and a white Tamara-the-Explorer tank-top handed to her.

Collette's eyebrows rose. The round knob of clearish white rock the girl had handed her was not what Collette had expected it to be. 

Collette looked around, hoping no one was watching. If the adults overheard her telling the child what this was, they might quickly forget about finding the camel knee and the agreement they had signed to remove nothing from the Park, because the sparkling, clear rock with specks of fire inside it that this little girl held out to Collette was a tennis-ball sized, perfectly-formed fire opal. 

Collette had to shake her head to swat away the thoughts that were racing through them. The worth of this precious gemstone alone could pay for an entire dig, and then some. Cut and polished, it could make dozens if not a hundred pieces of rare, precious jewelry. If kept intact it would be museum quality, something that the California Museum of Natural History would display in the center of their Gems and Minerals Hall.

Dumb Regulation 358.57. No rocks, gems, fossils, wildlife or organic material may be taken from this state park without a permit from the California State Department of Forestry.

It had been heck just getting such a permit to remove fossils from the site for the Museum.  And that permit had been very, very specific on what they could and couldn't take out of the Park. Fossils, and fossils only, could be taken back to the Museum on this trip, no other type of rock, even those of inestimable value to science and the retail world could be brought back—opals included. A flicker of a thought to take the rock and shove it in her fanny pack when no one was looking sparked in Collette's mind. Then the ingrained doctrine that thou shalt not collect specimens for thine own gain every scientist had had brain washed into them from the time of their bachelor of science took back control.

No, she wouldn’t take the gem.     

But what a waste. Sheer waste. No one would ever get to see or appreciate such a specimen in the desert. Unless she marked it with a flag, and then marked the exact coordinates in her GPS, applied for a permit (which would take years if not months to get approved), raised funding, and by some miracle got back to this exact spot before a tourist or a rock hound had picked the opal up, it would remain a secret of the desert. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. There was no chance this rare gem would be there eighteen months from now when a permit and funding were in hand.

But such was life. The desert kept many secrets. Secrets that not even all the PhDs on the dig knew about. What Collette didn't count on were the secrets yet to come.

Chapter 2

Friday May 20, 202

T hat's just a rock , sweetie, said Collette to the little girl in the Tamara-the-Explorer top as she held out her little pudgy hand with the precious stone in it. Collette had deciding it would be best to not even let this eight year old know exactly what she held in her hand. You can put that back where you found it. Let's go over to the camel mound.

The group of sweating parents, eager youngsters, and paleontologists was walking towards the mound now like grasshoppers descending on a new crop of rice. Collette picked up her step as she gripped onto the little girl’s hand to guide the child there.

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, the sound of a race track trumpet could have blared through the desert along with the bleeeeeeep of a gate bell and some announcer's voice calling And their off!, the way Collette and most of the group was now hurrying towards the mound.  Collette had been stopped for a second to answer the little girl’s question, and would not be the first there because of that, but she wouldn’t be the last either.

Quick, slow. Quick, slow, slow. Colette had to keep reminding herself every time her stride got a little too long to slow the heck down so it didn't look as if she was flying towards the mound like a winged harpy after Phineus's food in Greek mythology. But it was hard to ignore the adrenaline. After hours of combing through rock, the prospect of the first real find was almost more than she could take.

What if she could be the one to find the rest of the leg of the camel lying just inches below the red dirt of the mound? Or, what if their team was the first to find an entire prehistoric camel skeleton at Fire Rock Canyon?  The Southern California Natural History Museum that was financing the dig back in Los Angeles had beautiful eight-foot-tall displays of Camelops, the Miocene camel, but none of their specimens had come from this site.  If Collette’s group did find an entire skeleton now, would there be differences between camels from this part of California as opposed to the Rancho La Brea tar pits 110 miles south, or Redlands in San Bernadino County to the East? Differences that would be enough to make the camel a new sub-species? Yes, there was a chance here and now, for not only the first head-to-toe skeleton of a Fire Rock Canyon Camelops with all the provenance necessary to add as much data as possible, but also for the discovery of a new sub-species

Hope sprung eternal in Collette’s heart. It was time to uncover at least one secret of the desert.

Chapter 3

Friday, May 20, 2022

Tamika Watson hit the plastic bottom of her designer Chad Styles holographic tennis shoes with her chocolate-colored fist again, knocking another marble-sized pebble out of the bottom of her shoe. Ug! No wonder she had been in abysmal foot pain for the past half hour as she trekked behind these paleowhats-its with the rest of the film crew in the middle of this oppressive desert heat. She had been stepping on a friggin’ mountain of stones the whole time. In fact, from the amount of white and yellow sand that had streamed out as she held upside down the one and only pair of shoes she owned that were not high heels, she felt like half the Park had somehow gotten inside what should have been well- insulated and airtight shoes. At least she imagined they would be airtight from the 200$ price tag the shoes had come with.

Mike Stetson, the camera operator, with his long brown hair, mangy beard of the same color and dusty ancient pair of baggy jeans, so long out of fashion they were actually beginning to come back had warned Tamika that her over-the-top holographic athletic shoes, though acceptable in the gym would be no match for all the hiking and off-roading they needed to do for this documentary she had signed up for. And he had been right. Not only was she ruining the shiny silver exterior of her beloved sports shoes with all the trekking over small hills of loose gold and white sand and valleys of even looser sand and pebbles, she was feeling the fact that the souls were made to grip onto a wood basketball court floor, not protect her feet from the steep inclines and sharp pebbles of the gravelly desert floor.

And Mike had been the nice one. Kathleen, the AD and Key grip, and Joel, the sound mixer, had been less polite about Tamika’s choice of footwear and actually suppressed giggles when she met them at the UCLA film school parking lot three days ago to carpool with the small crew to the site for principal photography.

The fact was, Tamika wasn’t really an outdoorsman. To be honest, she was anything but. She loved nothing more than the sparkling, white-walled, fancily-decorated, and cool, air-conditioned houses of LA and the people therein. People. That was really her thing. She loved to talk to and meet new people, especially ones who came from other countries or backgrounds different from herself.  That was what the final project for her masters’ class in film had been on—a documentary on the people who came to UCLA from all over the world to learn American film techniques. The documentary had followed four immigrants from Thailand, India, Saudi Arabia, and Belgium for a week as they tackled language barriers, equipment with different units of measurement, and culture shock, in addition to learning for the first time about film.

The short, one-hour documentary Filming From Foreign Shores hadn’t won any awards–that had gone to Riku, the half-Indian half-black student with an unlimited budget and a father who was friends with the faculty, but, Filming From Foreign Shores had been good enough to get Tamika a pass in cinematography and allow her to graduate.

Which was why Tamika wondered with much annoyance how it was she had gotten here again as a boom operator for a second-rate documentary maker, sweating and stinking in the middle of a hot desert.  Sigh. What she had to endure in order to pay her dues. The fact was, she had been lucky to even get this job holding a twelve-inch stick with a big fuzzy white microphone on the end of it. Paying jobs anywhere in the film industry, even for the bottom-of-the rung production assistant or PA, were hard, if not impossible to find. Especially only a year after graduating. Many a starving filmmaker had spent a decade or more waiting tables and asking do you want fries with that before they had any regular work in the industry. And it was the industry. Everyone in the entire state of California called the all-consuming business behemoth that was film and television the industry as if no other industry really existed. And to the millions of people trying to climb, murder and sleep their way to the top as actors, directors, and crew, it really was the only one.

Luckily, Tamika didn’t think she’d have it as hard as some of her associates and friends did as they poured themselves into the merciless monster of entertainment that ate the depths of the human soul for breakfast. That was thanks to one small event. Yes, thanks to one political event in the cursed year of 2020, she just might not have to be chewed up and spat out as her friends were. That one political event had been the police beating of Joey Green and his subsequent death. The start of the Justice for Joey movement had changed Hollywood overnight. Suddenly every movie producer, every television commercial maker, every script writer and every anybody who was anybody wanted to hire, cast, and work with more black people than they ever had before. It had been cool, back six years ago when she had come to UCLA, to have at least one African American on set.  Tokenism, back then had been all the rage.

But now...but now...African American brothers and sisters were everywhere. The darker your skin the more likely you were to get a job. This fact had been a strike in Tamika’s favor, considering her gorgeous, unblemished skin happened to be melanin rich, very melanin rich.  But the Covid-19 Pandemic had been a strike against her. Suddenly, like this vast red-and-gold desert, all the productions involving human interest had dried up. No one, no film maker, no talent, no studio or production company wanted anything to do with humans talking to each other in tight, confined spaces. No, thanks to Covid-19, every project Tamika had read about in the trades before graduation, and all the projects she had dreamed of making herself suddenly became impossible.

In fact, it was something of a miracle two years after Covid, that entertainment was being made at all. Most people no longer wore masks everywhere, but the fear of the dreaded disease was still prevalent enough to halt or curtail a lot of productions. And what was being made however, was not to Tamika’s liking...at all. Suddenly, as if Moses had come down from Mt. Sinai with an eleventh commandment, Thou shalt only make films outdoors, all film makers had to make nature documentaries. Fresh clean air. Lots of space for social distancing. Entertainment that visually took people out of their houses. Nature had it all.

And so, Tamika had found her first paying job to be one she never would have dreamed of—holding a stick with a fuzzy microphone above people while they gummed about rocks in the desert.

Tamika stuck her shoe back onto her already-dirt-riddled, once-white and somewhat-stinking sock and took in all the air she could through her nose. At least the desert air smelled clean and fresh compared to LA. And at least she was getting paid for this job. That part a number of her friends were jealous of her for. They were starving themselves on tasteless ramen and peanut butter and jelly trying to land anything, even gigs that didn’t pay. Yes, by some miracle, or God’s goodness, she had missed an entire rung of the Hollywood latter.

Tamika tried to remember this as she fingered the long, black plastic boom handle and stared at Mike filming, or trying to film Liam McCain. 

Now it was Tamika’s turn to try not to laugh. Liam McCain, the famous, well, semi-famous star of the Indie flick Road Rage Runner, was standing in front of Mike’s camera and doing what film and television personalities do best—be an a-hole.

Are you sure there isn’t too much glare on my nose? Liam asked Mike for the third or fourth time.

Oh, man. She couldn’t suppress a laugh. Tamika raised her hand and pretended to itch her mouth so that she could hide the giggle that was coming out. What was Liam thinking?  They were in a frickin’ desert in the middle of the day with the hot sun glaring. Multiple parts of his long pointy face and balding head had glare on them. Even if they hadn’t been in the middle of the Mojave Desert, this was a low-budget film. He wasn’t going to have HMU, hair and makeup, running over to him every five seconds powdering his nose.

No, no. You’re all good. We’re almost ready to roll. Let me just pull this focus, said Mike confidently.

Tamika could tell Mike had had enough of this stuffed shirt who, ironically insisted on wearing a pale blue dress shirt out in the desert to narrate the film about the Southern California Natural History Museum and the expeditions funded through it. Mike was a steady guy, but too much of Liam McCain would drive anyone nuts.

Alright, let me get Dr. what’s his name, uh, Dr. Shortstop, over here for the interview, said Liam as he looked over his shoulder.

A tall, lean man who looked more like he belonged in a biker gang than with his yellow paisley bandanna around his skinny neck, double tattoo sleeves and pierced ears and nose walked over to Liam from the three-foot mound he had been studying a couple of feet away.

That’s Doctor Shoresham, said the paleontological doctor itching his short brown beard as he walked up beside Liam. He sounded as if he had had just about enough of Liam McCain as well.

Alright, Dr. Shortsam, said Liam McCain. We’re ready for your interview.

Tamika watched as the man with the heavy-metal-band, black T-shirt and the tattoo sleeves patiently stood beside Liam, the writer, director, producer and star of this as yet-untitled documentary. The paleontologist, who Tamika had a hard time believing was actually an academic, seemed a little nervous, like maybe his confident renegade biker look was just a facade and he was really a shy, anxious type beneath it all. She wasn’t surprised, though, that Liam had chosen to follow Dr. Shoresham and his little group of junior paleontologists and their parents onto his part of the dig away from Drs. Maven and Hillyard. Dr. Shoresham’s biker look took one by surprise and would likely do the same to the audience. He was the antithesis of what everyone assumed a paleontologist should look like, and Tamika knew Liam liked this. A-hole that he was, Liam McCain did have a flare for showmanship, he intuitively knew what glued eyeballs to a screen as he had proved with the other documentary he had written produced and directed—An Eye on the Stars—about various celebrities who loved star-gazing. Liam seemed to be able to be able to pick out of a crowd of people the one person who was the most engaging both in appearance and demeanor.

And this intuition was not letting him down now. Most filmmakers would have chosen to go with the larger group of paleontologists and children and interview the heads of the dig. But Liam had not been able to take his eyes off of Shoresham the day that he saw him. Rebel without a cause meets academia had been his description of the interviews he planned to conduct the next day when he spoke with his team the night before. Wherever that guy goes tomorrow, so do we

And so, they had. And the result had been spectacular. In the two interviews that morning, one about camp, the other about camp chow, the camera had loved Dr. Shoresham. Tamika had seen the dailies, short playbacks of clips they had taken on Mike’s camera, when they were in the bright red jeep off-roading to the first dig sight and they were incredible. Despite Shoresham’s dark, grungy appearance he had a smile that lit up the camera and a way with words that took so much of the mystery out of paleontology. Shoresham, or Correy, as he liked to be called, also had a wicked sense of humor—something a lot of the other paleontologists seemed to be missing.

Here, put these on, said Shoresham, handing Liam a pair of cheap dollar store sunglasses.

Oh, thank you, said Liam. Why?

They might help with that glare on your face, said Correy Shoresham without expression as if the glare on Liam’s face would stop if he just couldn’t see it.

Oh, of course, said Liam who believed anything the scientist said was golden and that if Correy Shoresham said less glare was visible on Liam’s face to other people by his wearing sunglasses, than that must be the case. He put the sunglasses on his long, pointy face.

Tamika let out a little giggle and Mike did what he rarely ever did. He smiled. Correy had figured out Liam real quick. As smart as Liam was, his vanity often clouded that intelligence. On top of that, he was absolutely star-struck and considered anyone in authority, like a paleontologist on a dig, someone he wanted to be buddy-buddy with. Correy had appeared to perceive this in the two short ten-minute interviews they had done and decided to see if Liam would fall for an idea as stupid as putting on sunglasses to reduce glare on your face if Correy suggested it.

Liam did.

And Liam was also oblivious to Tamika’s and Mike’s laughter.

Nah, I don’t think I should cover my eyes on camera, said Liam, handing the glasses back to a now-slightly-smiling Correy. But thanks anyway.

Tamika looked away so Liam wouldn’t see her losing it. Liam may have been an arrogant jerk wad, but he was still her boss.

Ok, we’re ready to roll, said Mike who had been able to reign in his laughter better than Tamika.

Tamika stood up, picking up the long boom and walked into position next to Mike. She reached the mic over Liam’s head. She had to make sure it was close enough to pick up the sharp sound of his rather high-pitched voice and the softer sounds of the desert, and yet not be in the frame of the camera.

Alright, roll film! called Liam.

It’s day six here on the paleontological dig... began Liam.

Suddenly, Tamika felt sharp vibrations on the ground beneath her feet. She looked down to see the pebbles on the path between the mounds leading up to the camera begin to bounce as the ground began to sway.

What’s that? asked Liam as the shaking grew stronger. A rumbling sound thundered in the distance like a far-away storm. And yet, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Tamika looked for something to brace herself with. It was hard balancing with this twelve-foot metal rod in her hand. But there was nothing to hold onto.

Keep rolling, keep rolling, yelled Liam as if Mike was doing anything else. Mike of all people seemed the most unphased.

Tamika looked back to Kathleen, the AD to see if she was ok, but Kathleen, too, looked more excited about the prospect of catching something unusual for her sound mixing than she was worried about the instability of the ground.

Filmmakers were such a weird bunch. They’d still be filming and capturing sound if a hole opened up in the earth and they were swallowed by it. In fact, they’d probably be thrilled they were getting it on camera.

Tamika felt the hairs rise up on her skin as the shaking grew even stronger. She had to separate her feet and stand with legs akimbo to balance now. It was incredibly difficult to hold the boom upright, keep it out of frame, and maintain her balance in her fancy shoes, but she knew if she wanted to be a filmmaker this was what she had to do.

It’s an earthquake, yelled Liam, finally getting it.

That was it! Tamika was done. She wanted to run and hide. She almost dropped the boom.

Mike looked up from the camera and shot her a glance that held her in place.

We’re actually enduring an earthquake, here at Fire Rock Canyon, boomed Liam in his most velvety voice to the camera.

Gosh, he was enjoying this.

The ground is shaking and... Liam continued, but before Liam could finish his sentence the ground slowed down from its violent back-and-forth motion to a complete and utter standstill.

I think it’s over... Thank heavens, it’s over, Liam said for dramatic effect. Tamika knew better than to think the man was actually glad it was over. In fact, he probably would have had it start all over again if he could get more footage from that.

Tamika let out a sigh, trying her best not to let it out too loudly. She was shaken—no pun intended—and wanted to go hide somewhere. Really, there hadn’t been much danger to them since they were outside and the tallest thing around them was a four-foot mount of pretty solid earth, but still, the nervousness that comes with the ground shaking wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

Did you get that? Liam yelled to Mike as if Mike was suddenly a mile away. Did you get that?

Mike nodded with a vigorous excitement of his own. Yeah. I got the pebbles bouncing and everything. The camera didn’t sway much on this tripod, but yeah, I got it.

Dr. Shoreham, said Liam, finally putting in the effort to pronounce the paleontologist’s name right. Tell us a little about what just occurred.

If Tamika hadn’t been so shaken up, she would have rolled her eyes. What was this dinosaur doctor supposed to tell them about an earthquake that everyone didn’t already know?

Well, said Correy as coolly and as calmly as if nothing had happened. That ground shaking is called an earthquake.

Liam frowned. Was Correy messing with him again? He looked back at Mike who was smiling again. Yup, Correy was messing with him again.

Liam