"Eric Flint & Ryk E. Spoor - Boundary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

fifteen centimeters long and ranging from three to six centimeters wide, with a concave side
and a little hook on the narrow end.

“Some kind of brachiopod relative?”

“Not one I’m familiar with. Look at these marks here.”

Joe frowned, then took the object and studied it more closely. “Well, it’s definitely a fossil,
and… Those sure look like muscle attachment scars. But what’re they doing on both sides of
this thing, if it’s a shell? Should run down only one side, shouldn’t they?”

“That’d be my expectation, too. But if this is a bone, why is it so thin and concave? I’ve
never even heard of anything like that.”

Joe was good at visualizing anatomy—much better than Helen, in fact, who always had to
sit down and sketch it out a piece at a time. His face now screwed up in concentration. “If you
had a… no, no, that wouldn’t make sense. Oh, but maybe… no, not that either. I suppose if…”

He turned the fossil over, examining the backside carefully. “Darn. No sign of it being a
piece of something else, either, which might have explained it.” He turned it over and over a
couple more times, shifting his point of view as though it might suddenly become an obvious
and familiar fossil from some different angle, then handed it back to Helen.

“Okay, you win, Jackie. I’m beat. Do you know what it is?”

Jackie shook her head, looking excited and trying not to—after all, she wasn’t a high school
girl any longer, and hadn’t been for a number of years. “No, not really. I knew it didn’t look
like anything I’d seen before, but I was sure you people would know right away. Are you guys
putting me on? You really, truly don’t know what it is?”

“Really, truly, Jackie,” Helen said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, or heard of anything like
it. You say you know where you found it?”

Jackie looked hurt. “Of course I do, Helen! Haven’t I been keeping a journal since my
second year doing this?”

“I’m sorry. I should have said: will you show us where you found it, and where you think it
came from?”

“Of course. Let me get my hiking boots on, and we’ll go out there now.”
 “There” turned out to be a few miles out, not all that far from the old dig site, but to the
northwest up a small arroyo. “I found it lying over here, half under some sand. I think it
washed down from somewhere up the arroyo.”

Helen measured the area by eye, trying to visualize the rains, the wash coming down, the
size of the fossil.

She thought Jackie was right. “Let’s go up a ways, then, and see if we find anything.”