"Ian Stewart - Environmental Friendship Fossle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Ian)

The old man waved his hand dismissively. "Young people got no respect for their elders no more," he
complained. He turned his back on us and returned to some inner contemplation--I wondered what he
saw in his mind's eye.
Mammoths, maybe.
****
Salima was waiting for me at Speedy's, a tiny eatery with an even tinier kitchen, not quite hole-in-the-wall
but that was mainly because there wasn't room for a wall. It had a bar, a row of wobbly tables on plinths,
a couple of extra tables jammed into what counted as spare space, and a few stools lined up against the
window, which was always wide open. You could get passable Mexican food at the Speedy Gonzales
restaurant, and a pretty good margarita for the lowest price in Hong Kong. Great cuisine it wasn't, but it
filled the gaps and beat the pants off the rather bland offerings that the Cantonese like to eat. My jaded
palate needs something with a bit more zing.

Salima had zing, and better still, she had a first-class brain. Her mother was Cantonese, her father
Egyptian. Both had died when she was a teenager--train crash, maglev failure. It could have destroyed
her, but it brought out her fighting instincts, made her tough and independent. She'd worked her way
through college, and was currently doing a part-time Ph.D. under a certain Professor Zhao in the
Paleontology Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her topic was mesolithic hunting and its
contribution to extinctions, and she was paying her way by acting as one of Zhao's lab technicians. His
department hadn't existed twenty years ago--Hong Kong does have a few fossil species, but nothing
worth setting up a department for. But when control of Hong Kong reverted to the People's Rep, the
University of Shenyang set up a satellite operation at HKPU to take up some of the workload generated
by the Yixian sediments in Liaoning Province, and Zhao had been hired from Beijing. The list of important
fossils that have come out of the Yixian deposits is as long as a Diplodocus's backbone, and considerably
more significant for the history of life on Earth, I gather.

Right now, Salima's income derives from cleaning up dinobird remains. Zhao had spent several years in
northern Asia, which is where he'd first gotten interested in the effects of mesolithic hunting. But as soon
as the Liaoning dinobird remains were discovered, he returned to Beijing and started working on the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. His long-term aim was to document the precise sequence of events that
killed off the dinosaurs. But he'd kept the Pleistocene research going, too.

Over two burrito supremes (that meant they came with guacamole and sour cream) we caught up on
each others' days. She'd spent hers cleaning up one leg-bone of a fossil Confuciosaurus. Apparently an
entire flock of them had dropped out of the sky one Late Jurassic afternoon, probably caught in a cloud
of carbon monoxide from a nearby volcano. They'd splattered into the mud of a lake and ended up as
strata.

"But the really exciting news," she said, breaking off in mid-flow, "is the new mammoth graveyard near
Yerekhtenya-Tala. I should be able to get really good data if Zhao swings us access to some specimens."

"I'm sure you'll pester him until he does. Graveyard?"

"Well, it's not really a graveyard--I mean, the mammoths weren't buried deliberately. But there are so
many frozen corpses that it looks like one."

"Ah."

"What's fantastic, aside from the sheer number of animals, is that they all date from the end of the