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

Luck, luck, luck.

The word kept repeating itself over and over in Helen’s mind, as she stood there looking at
the wall of the arroyo in a state of half-shock.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe repeated for the fifth time, finally straightening up from his examination.
“Helen, that’s a Deinonychus, or I’m just a first-year student.”

“And if the rest is in the same condition, we’ve got ourselves a fully-articulated skeleton.”

Amateur or not, Jackie understood how very rare that was, and her excitement was only
restrained by an attempt to be more professional and dignified than the professionals around
her. Theropod skeletons, like the Deinonychus, were rare enough to be noteworthy, but
fully-articulated skeletons—skeletons that had remained pretty much connected as they had
been in life—were vanishingly rare.

Helen glanced down the arroyo, frowning. “Odd, though.”

“What’s odd?”

She pulled out the unknown fossil. “If this came from here, there’s no way it’s a shell. Not
of a water-dweller, anyway.”

Joe nodded. “These are land formations; late Cretaceous, maybe even Maastrichtian.”

“No ‘maybe,’ involved, Joe. Look at where your hand is.”

Joe looked at the rock wall he’d been leaning against. “What—”

He suddenly started laughing. “You can’t be serious, Helen! It’s like pulling three jackpots
in a row at Vegas!”

“What is it?” Jackie asked, seeing the narrow, dark band both Joe and Helen were staring
at. Then she whipped around, eyes wide. “You mean…?”

“Yes.” Helen was hardly able to believe it herself. “It looks like our fossil is sitting right
smack on the K-T boundary.”

“Where the comet—um, sorry.” Jackie caught herself before finishing the sentence. She
tended to forget that the Alvarez Hypothesis was a still a touchy subject for a lot of
paleontologists, even if she herself thought it was a darn neat idea.

“Yes, where the comet.” Helen said the words in a half-snort, half-chuckle.
 Fortunately for Jackie, Helen was less hostile to the Alvarez Hypothesis than most members
of her profession. She didn’t doubt at all that an impact had happened at the K-T Boundary,
which marked the end of the Mesozoic Era. She simply questioned whether it had the
world-wide cataclysmic effects that the hypothesis proposed. There were other impact craters
about as big as the one in Yucatan, after all. The Manicouagan, to name just one. But they’d
had no discernable ecological effects at all; not even regional ones, so far as anyone could