by B. C. CHASE
“Tell them something they will believe. Even at the risk of looking selfish: 'I can't handle a funeral now' would do. Just please don't tell them the true reason. I don't want to cause undue alarm.”
Wesley suddenly wondered if this would be good person to relate his assessment to. He was eager to talk with anyone who would listen and possibly help. “My wife didn't have a miscarriage, you know.”
“You mean she wasn't pregnant?”
“Oh no. She was fourteen weeks pregnant. What I mean is that her doctor told me that she flushed the baby, but I was there that night and she didn't. She thought the baby was on the bed until I saw that it was missing.”
“Okay . . . .”
“So she didn't flush it, but it was gone.”
“Hmm,” Doctor Compton sounded patronizing.
“Hear me out, please! The baby just disappeared. I'm telling you this because I don't know who else who might be able to help.”
There was silence on the other line. “So what do you think happened to it if she did not miscarry?”
“I don't know.”
“Well, in my mind, the only other alternative would be that someone came into your home and took the fetus from your wife, unbeknownst to her or to you. How would you propose that happened?”
“All I'm saying is that the baby disappeared, but she didn't flush it!”
“I'm sorry, but I have to side with the doctor you spoke to. She must have flushed it. I know you'd like to believe differently, but we must come to terms with reality sometimes, even if it's uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, okay,” Wesley said, but his feelings did not agree with his words. Wasn't there anyone who would listen to him, even if he sounded crazy?
With a little introspection, he realized that he wouldn't.
“Mr. Peterson?” Doctor Compton said.
His reply came out sounding defeated, “Yes.”
“Missing children in any state fall under FBI jurisdiction.”
“Oh?”
“If I were in your shoes, I would contact the FBI and report your child as missing.”
“Thank you.”
“Best of luck to you.”
“Really. Thank you,” Wesley's voice cracked. He was overcome by suddenly having a slight suggestion of hope.
China Academy of Sciences
Oddly, Doctor Ming-Zhen's paper on the man-eating deinocheirus had been easily approved for publication in a prodigious journal by the anonymous scientists who peer reviewed it, yet became the subject of unrelenting castigation and dismissal from everyone else. Peer review was an excellent system by which academics could either anonymously censor others with whom they disagreed, or hide from controversy after they signed off on truth that the public couldn't stomach. In this case, none of the original reviewers of the paper came forward to support Doctor Ming-Zhen. Not one. The journal, however, issued a retraction.
No one believed that he and his team had found Homo sapiens within the belly of a deinocheirus, especially a deinocheirus that was so complete in its preservation and so surprisingly menacing in its construction. The whole thing simply seemed so entirely implausible, and even with all the evidence, no one was willing to recall Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adage, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Before long, Doctor Ming-Zhen was horrified to hear many calling his discovery an absolute hoax, from the human remains to the deinocheirus itself. As this line of thought gradually came to be accepted by the media and, with them, most scientists, he was angered not only because of how unjust it was for him personally, but even more so because of the damage it did to his team of pupils.
Then, the unthinkable happened.
One evening he was watching the news on a large screen, his wife standing behind him, when two of his students appeared on an interview. Undoubtedly buckling under the tremendous pressure brought to bear and determined to salvage their own careers, they told the world that the fossils were a chicanery and that their esteemed professor was a fraud.
One was the carouser Chao. The other, his precious Jia Ling.
His wife placed a hand on his shoulder. “I am very sorry,” she said.
He could not muster a response. He was utterly devastated, and he was filled with a terrible rage against Chao, who had doubtless pushed Jia Ling into this treachery.
In short order, Doctor Ming-Zhen was labeled the greatest fraud of paleontology.
After that blow, the issue became a simple matter of faith, with a very small number of his closest friends and colleagues quietly accepting Doctor Ming-Zhen's testimony (because they knew his character), while the rest of the world chomped at the bit in zealous outrage, practically ready to have him hanged for scientific heresy.
Because he was the head of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, the institution itself was castigated. Calls were made for his resignation. He found himself shunned at the institution by all but a handful of professors.
Because he did not resign, the Academy of Sciences, and, by virtue of equivalence, all of Chinese paleontology took the fall. There were many claims from the rest of the world that this was only the pinnacle in a series of fallacious discoveries. Papers were rejected for publication on the basis of mere suspicion. New discoveries were ignored, scrutinized to the point of exhaustion. It was a catastrophe for Chinese science.
Doctor Ming-Zhen suspected a sinister reason for all the uproar against Chinese paleontology.
Before he published his infamous paper on the man-eating deinocheirus, China had swiftly risen to prominence as the epicenter of paleontology, with more, better-preserved discoveries surfacing there than anywhere else, and more experts in the field than any other nation. Because China now had such a large and thriving crop of its own homegrown paleontologists, scientists from the outside were rarely admitted to partake in the abundance, and if they were, they were mere spectators or dirt-pushers. For this reason, the rest of the world was dripping with envy, and Doctor Ming-Zhen's supposed fraudulence, and the Academy's silence on the subject, gave them the perfect excuse to shut China down. The ire was nothing more than basal human jealousy, he thought.
Regardless of the cause, he wondered what he possibly could do to redeem himself and his few perseveringly loyal students.
And then he received a call from his mother at the giant assisted living facility. She demanded an immediate visit. She did this very frequently. At first, he told her now wasn't the time, but she would not accept “no” for an answer.
So when he arrived at her tiny apartment and sat down beside her, she said, “I've seen you on the news. It seems,” she coughed, “you've run into some trouble.”
He hung his head.
“Zhou, you know we did not support you becoming a paleontologist.” She took his hands in her withered ones, “But we could not deny that you became a good one. Before he died, your father told me that he was very glad that you had not become an engineer, after all. You made us more proud as a paleontologist than you ever could have as an engineer.” He felt like a child as tears welled up in his eyes. Though he didn't know it before, his whole being had been yearning to hear this.
She said earnestly, “You can prove to them that you are who we know you are. You are not a liar, you are a man of character and honor. You can prove to them the truth.” She firmly shook his hand between both of hers, “You only need to go and do it.” She then straightened in her seat, frowning, “And besides, it will keep your mind from negative energy.” She looked out her window absently for a moment, appearing to have a senile moment. Then she turned her head slightly and jumped in her seat at the sight of him. “You're not gone yet?” she clucked. “Now go!” she waved her arms. “Go show them!”
His mother's little pep talk ultimately gave him the encouragement he needed to dismiss the uproar around him and to return to science for the evidence he needed.
It was w
hen he was in the middle of this research that he was called to the head of the Academy’s office.
Yue Zhang, the Xiàozhăng (head) of the China Academy of Sciences, was an impatient man, prone to fits of anger when things were not going according to his timeline. But he was also sensible, highly intelligent, and equitable. He had been a near-failing student in school himself, and did not possess a PhD in any field, but his aptitude at management was second-to-none. It was for this reason that he had led China's most venerable science institution for the last ten years.
Short, with a round face and piercing black eyes under thick eyebrows, he looked down at Doctor Ming-Zhen from an especially large desk and tall chair. Zhang said, “I am sure you have heard of the calls for your resignation.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen looked down, “I have considered resigning myself, for the sake of the Academy.”
“And what has stopped you?” the superior inquired sharply.
Doctor Ming-Zhen looked up and said calmly, “I did nothing wrong.”
Zhang took a deep breath, casting a glance out the window as if he longed to be somewhere else, and said, “Now you know you have already tried everything. No amount of photographs, documentation, radioisotope dating, or remains will satisfy them. They've taken thousands of samples of the fossils and done their own studies. It's all come to nothing. You cannot prove it to them.”
“You are correct that they will ever accept the original fossils as genuine. But I can prove what the fossils prove.”
“Which is?”
“That Darwinian evolution over vast amounts of time has not occurred.”
Zhang raised a skeptical brow, “And how could you prove that?”
Doctor Ming-Zhen sat back in his chair, “Antarctica.”
Zhang furrowed his thick eyebrows, “Antarctica? What relevance could that possibly have?”
Doctor Ming-Zhen explained, “Once, many years ago, I assisted a colleague at San Diego State University in documenting fossils from the Hell Creek formation. It covers parts of North America; Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming. It is notoriously fertile.”
“Yes?”
“Hell Creek has yielded a treasure trove of all varieties of dinosaur fossils over the years. Tyrannosaurus, triceratops, and ankylosaurus, for example. You've heard of all of those, I assume?”
“Yes.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “Well, the fossils my friend from San Diego State University and I cataloged were not dinosaurs at all.”
“No?”
“No.” The paper that resulted from their efforts was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and quickly fell into obscurity.
Thousands of representations of all kinds of animals were discovered at Hell Creek, including modern and extinct ones: all manner of amphibians, reptiles, fish, and birds (including many species still alive in modernity). Hell Creek also contained a wealth of plant specimens, ninety percent of which were angiosperms (flowering plants), a type supposedly in its evolutionary beginnings. In the words of one professor of paleontology, “If you've ever wondered why so many prehistoric animals are dated sixty-five to seventy-five million years ago, in the Cretaceous, it's because most of them were discovered in Hell Creek.”
Also found there were over 1,000 mammalian specimens, and it was precisely these which Doctor Ming-Zhen and his colleague documented.
Spreading his hands, Doctor Ming-Zhen asked, “You tell me, what was such an abundance of mammals doing in a place of history where they were allegedly in their infancy?”
“Weren't they all just little rats?”
“No,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “They weren't.” He cleared his throat, “There were primates. Tree-dwelling primates.”
Zhang leaned back with a look of surprise. He blinked, “You cannot be serious.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “Oh, they call them 'primitive' primates.”
“Why haven't I ever heard about these Cretaceous primates before?” Zhang asked, clearly bedeviled.
Doctor Ming-Zhen shrugged, “Everybody wants to hear about the dinosaurs, so we paleontologists don't talk about the other animals we dig up.”
“So you think this lends credence to your discovery of the man in the dinosaur stomach? I really don't think that's enough to—”
Doctor Ming-Zhen interrupted him, “There's more to it than that. Because most of the Hell Creek formation was originally dated to the Cretaceous, in the early 1900's, as more and more fossils of more and more different species were unearthed, it sent the evolutionary timeline back to the drawing board continuously.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. It is the way honest science should work.”
“Yes. As species were added to the Cretaceous epoch, science was forced to depart from what I was taught in my early days in the field: the old textbooks explained matter-of-factly that the amphibians led to the reptiles (which then included dinosaurs) which led to the mammals and the birds. In some cases, the mix of supposed dinosaur (supposedly Cretaceous) and mammal (supposedly Paleocene) remains was so jumbled that it presented a seemingly insurmountable problem for the timeline. Bug Creek (part of the Hell Creek formation) is a perfect example. Everyone had to breathe a sigh of relief when a solution was found to this problem. The new term ‘reworked fossil’ was coined, and it was easily concluded that many fossils had been moved into place and re-fossilized—by some artificial means such as erosion. This is such a problem that, in order to boost credibility, studies sometimes must specify that the age of the rocks is ‘undisputed.’
“Now, the textbooks have a convoluted version of history that varies from textbook to textbook but generally refers to a giant burst of life in the Cretaceous followed quickly by a mass extinction (somehow survived by many mammals).” Doctor Ming-Zhen leaned forward, “My question is now: was it possible that the variety of animals at Hell Creek represents not the population of an era, but rather the same type of species localization one would find in any modern environment? At some point, it isn’t enough to keep revising the timeline. At a certain point, one must question the entire paradigm.”
“I'm not sure I understand,” Zhang replied, shifting uncomfortably.
Doctor Ming-Zhen explained, “For example, a child can name the animals typically found in the savannah, and the same child can also tick off many of the animals usually found in the Congo. But the lists would always be different. Giraffes in the savannah, gorillas in the Congo. Different areas host different species.” He waited, allowing his superior to digest his statement.
“So you are saying that the Hell Creek formation could possibly be a representation of a specific environment hospitable to specific animals rather than an era, or a layer, of geologic time?”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “To the east, in the Chicago area, mastodons, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and other large mammalian bones are found, but no dinosaurs. Not one. Not even a fragment of a dinosaur is found in that area. Why? Was it species localization? In California and in Florida the same list of mammalian bones have been dug up, but not a single dinosaur in Florida and very, very few in California. In Missouri and down to Texas, both dinosaurs and large mammals are found in abundance. In Colorado, at higher altitudes the large mammals, but lower down are the dinosaurs.
“So what if the cretaceous, and all the other epochs with it, did not exist at all? When you're looking at Hell Creek sediments, you don't say, 'Here are the mastodons on top and here are the dinosaurs on the bottom.' If Hell Creek represents a forest environment with frequent flooding, which I suspect it does, then the mammals you find there are suitable to just such a place. Perhaps the simplest way to look at this is the right way to look at it: mastodons are not found in the Hell Creek areas because mastodons didn't like that environment. What if the epochs have nothing to do with time? What if epochs are actually habitats?”
“But what if that area was covered in ice, during the ice age, so that's why the mastodons are not found there?”
“Visible Hell Creek is not a huge vast area: rather it appears bordering a vast area where very few fossils from anything except plants are found, the Fort Union Formation, supposedly formed during the Pleistocene, right after the Cretaceous. So let's assume that, during an ice age, ice was covering this huge Fort Union area as well as the surrounding exposed Hell Creek areas, preventing mammoths from living there. How is it that the ice was there, but it wasn't covering Hot Springs, South Dakota, right nearby; Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan to the north; or New York to the west, all places where mammoth fossils are found?
“And why are dinosaurs so scarce in California? Because it was covered in ocean back then and they were all washed away, as they say? How about because it didn’t offer the habitat that dinos prefer?”
Zhang thought for a moment. Then he said, “But don't you usually dig very deeply for the dinosaur fossils, because they are from far back in history and therefore in a deep layer?”
“Another myth. That's how they draw things in fantastical school textbooks. But the truth is, when dinosaur fossils are discovered, it is most often because they are exposed on the surface of the ground, not because they are dug up from deeply within it. In Hell Creek areas, the common method for finding fossils is by walking around looking for them, not by digging up vast mines. The same is true in the Gobi Desert here, the Sahara in Africa, and Patagonia in South America. The idea that these layers are perfectly laid down everywhere underneath our feet is entirely false. There are some places where it looks like some epochs might be discerned one on top of the other, in the Grand Canyon, for example. But even in the Grand Canyon, it is a muddy picture, with the highest layer dating to about 250 million years ago.”
Zhang scratched his nose. Then he said, “All right, so your major proposal is that mammoths lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but that they lived in separate areas because of the environments in those places. What does that have to do with Antarctica?”