Scotty was a Late Cretaceous predator that lived, and died, about sixty-five million years ago. Thereafter (until 1991, when a worn tooth and caudal vertebra were found protruding from the dirt) her mineralized bones lay entombed in a bleak, arid tributary of the Frenchman River, about half an hour’s drive southeast of town. Officially known as Chambery Coulee, the quarry is fondly regarded by paleontologists as “the Supermarket of the Dinosaurs.” In and around Scotty’s disarticulated bones lie the traces of an entire extinct world: fish scales, turtle skulls, champsosaur ribs, crocodile teeth, the frail tibiotarsus of a long-dead bird. Here, too, are the fragmented remains of Edmontonsaurus saskatchewanensis (the typical duck-billed dinosaur of the Late Cretaceous era) and of Triceratops horridus (sometimes crushed within fossilized T. rex dung). The triangular tooth of a pachycephalosaurus, the fang of a dromaeosaurid, or raptor.
It takes a few rounds of the gallery to begin to take everything in. These monstrous, fantastical beasts, with their horns and their fins and their bird-feet, had lived in a lush subtropical forest near the shore of an inland sea. They had lived and been buried here. And to think that I had been getting all tingly when I picked up echoes from my childhood or, across mere centuries, conjured up the vanished abundance of the buffalo prairie. Now I was being invited to stride lightly back over millions of years, to confront the final days of the Age of Reptiles. Relatively soon after Scotty died, a massive asteroid crashed into the Gulf of Mexico (near the present-day town of Chicxulub) with the force of a hundred million megatons of TNT, causing an apocalypse of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, incandescent ejecta, and a pall of ash and dust that enveloped the planet. This cataclysm marked the end of the terrible lizards.
And yet, out of this cosmic disaster, strange new life was born. Could it be that the mad genius of evolution is more ruthless and resourceful than we give it credit for? Perhaps, despite all of humanity’s worst efforts and the extinction crisis that we are bringing down on our own heads, life will eventually flood the world with its new inventions, as beautiful and grotesque as those that have been lost to the ravages of the past. It’s a brutal hope, but hope nonetheless.
At the T.rex Centre, crossing the threshold of mass extinction is as simple as stepping through a door. Leaving Scotty and Co. behind, we proceed through an archway and find ourselves circling around the spotlit skeleton of yet another gargantuan beast, this one sporting humped shoulders; a scooped-out, square-jawed skull; and a pair of bony spurs that sprout from what must have been its snout. A caption identifies it as a brontothere, or “thunder beast,” a long-vanished relative of the rhinoceros and the horse that lumbered around these hills for a thousand thousand years, sometime after the extinction of the dinosaurs. An artist’s rendition across the back wall combines the torso of a hippo with the hide of an elephant and a lugubrious wattled head that only a mother brontothere could love. The animal stands in a broad savanna, near the edge of a meandering stream, delicately protruding its loose upper lip to browse on the leaves of a tree.
Again, we are asked to imagine this scene playing out here. If the major repository of dinosaur bones lies just south of town, fossils from the Age of Mammals have been discovered in a number of sites to the north, east, and west, all within easy reach of Eastend. Together, these deposits document the epoch immediately following the impact disaster and pick up the story again in the era of the brontotheres. From then on, beginning about forty-five million years before the present and continuing for thirty million more, the record is remarkably rich and continuous. The Calf Creek quarry, straight north of town, for example, has yielded teeth and bones from more than seven dozen mammalian species, including Hesperocyon gregarius (the oldest known member of the dog family), tiny bears, ancestral deerlets and pronghorns, camels, rhinos, three kinds of miniature three-toed horses, and two types of giant brontotheres. All are now extinct.
I have to admit that I didn’t get all these facts straight on my first visit—there was too much oddity to absorb at once. In fact, even after several subsequent tours, I still wasn’t sure that I understood what I was being told, so one day I stopped to chat with the center’s paleontologist-in-residence, Tim Tokaryk. A big guy (“ex-football,” he explains), he occupies a cramped office just around the corner from the gift shop. Everything about his space—from the portrait of Darwin on the door to the shelves of learned volumes that crowd the walls—speaks of his dedication to science. What will he think of me if I ask him what I really want to know? Is it possible that the land around us remembers?
I watch Tim for signs of discomfort when I blurt out this embarrassing query, but he merely nods his head. “Within an hour’s drive of town, I can hit almost a continuous seventy-five million years of vertebrate history,” he says matter-of-factly, “from the end of the Western Interior Seaway, through the Late Cretaceous and the extinction event, all the way to the Age of Mammals and the emergence of the grasslands. If you want a wonderful, wild, and wicked story about the past and the present, this is the place to come. We have to realize that we’re the luckiest.”
After imbibing as much evolutionary excitement as we can handle, Keith and I often pause on the walkway outside the T.rex Centre to take in the view. See, just down below, there’s our little house on the edge of town, with its proud new window, its apple tree, and its tidy chain-link fence. Back in the everyday world, the monstrous procession of life and death on display in the T.rex Centre fades into fantasy, as if it were a kind of scientifically sanctified freak show. And so it remained until one day, a few months after our arrival in Eastend, when the here and now cracked open, and cracked me open, too, and the profound strangeness of the real world crept under my skin.
We were out walking on the flat benchlands above the center—Keith and I, the dogs, and our grownup daughter, who had joined us for a few days. It was stinking hot, mid-August, so when we noticed the shimmer of water on a cutaway bank down below, we made a beeline for it, the dogs panting in the vanguard. In they all went, humans and canines alike, and no one else seemed to notice that the pond was green and slimy, with an oozy, muddy bottom that sucked up between your toes. As I watched my ankles disappear into the muck, I realized that there were worse fates than being hot. Surely, I thought, someone should sit up on the shore and watch the dogs, in case one of them tried to run off.
At first, all the bathers were happy to lie in the water, but after a while, one pesky dachshund (oh, they are wonderful trouble those dogs!) developed serious wanderlust. After retrieving her several times, I plopped myself down in the dirt, red faced and streaming with sweat. I had had it. So when the darn dog took off yet again, I found myself appealing in desperation to the fairies, the genius loci, the lares and penates, to whatever powers might be listening, to see if I could cut a deal. If I went after the runaway one more time, the world had to agree to show me something special.
With this illusory prospect in mind, I mustered the strength to stagger to my feet, as the dog tripped lightly up a scabby little erosion channel, heading for parts unknown. “I’m on your tail, mutt,” I muttered as I closed in on her rear. “And, this time, you’re going on your leash.” But even as I attended to these practicalities, I kept scanning my surroundings, nurturing my heat-hazed hope. We’d cut a deal, hadn’t we? I’d done my part—dog in hand—so where was my reward? In the ooze down below, where my family was still lolling? On these scabrous cutbanks or in this dried-up watercourse? It looked like I’d been skunked. Then, just as I was on the verge of returning to normalcy, I noticed something odd. A rock was poking out of the edge of the path, quite unlike anything else around. It was lumpy, gray-white, and ugly, about the size of my head. Idly, I wrestled it out of the