Hairy Museum of Natural History

The main part of my time in Cobre Cañon was spent at a Sphenacodon quarry. Interspersed between layers of red and grey mudstone lay beautiful, purple-bronze bones from the early Permian—ribs and vertebrae and elegant, sharp-toothed jaws. In life, these bones would have supported sleek, sprawling predators, running down their prey on stout, muscled limbs and dispatching them with bone-crushing bites from their powerful jaws—jaws which, 300 million years ago, were some of the strongest the earth had ever seen.

300 million years of burial, however, weakened them considerably.

I hate to say that much of my first day at the quarry was spent learning how not to collect fossils. Few things can match the frustration of digging through a layer of hardened mud with a dental pick, miscalculating the required amount of force, and uncovering a pile of beautiful, tiny, purplish tiles that are all that remains from a bone that had rested, if not exactly comfortably then at least intact, for more than 15,000,000 generations. Although I feel fairly safe in assuming that the bones’ original owners had long since moved beyond any lingering attachments, each tiny fragment seemed to bristle with unfulfilled promise, accusing me of not holding up my end of the bargain. After all, they had done their part by staying put for an unfathomable length of time, beating astronomical odds on preservation—only to be rendered worthless by a moment’s clumsiness. Each tiny, shattered chip seemed to scream at me with 300,000,000 years of pent-up rage.

How could I argue with that? I accepted the crushing condemnation of the shards with a heavy groan, apologized to the more experienced (and understanding) members of the team, brushed the bits aside, and made a deep and solemn vow to the bone I lost that I would not, under any circumstance, make the same mistake with the next one.

After my third or fourth pile of little purple fragments, I grimly joked, “Well, its not everyone who can say they’ve spent the day beating the crap out of sphenacodonts.”

In the end, though, I did learn enough to collect a few bits and pieces without dinging them up too badly, and hopefully someday the folks in the prep lab will be able to salvage something worthwhile from the jackets we pulled from the quarry. My last day there, I picked up some of the deep red mud that surrounded the fossils, mixed it into a wash, and painted a rough sphenacodont portrait. I brought a few handfuls of the grit home and used it to create the scene you see here, Sphenacodon making its way down to an ancient riverbed. Click on it to open a larger version in a new window.

This piece is dedicated to the bones that I let down.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Carboniferous, Permian, Synapsids.