The Walking Whales
Page 7
long before I ever worked here.3 Locality 62 forms a low wall with fos-
sils embedded in the hard rock. As we kneel down to inspect the fossils,
we notice a braincase of a whale. It looks very similar to one Philip
Gingerich collected across the Indus River from here, less than twenty
miles away.4 Philip called that whale Pakicetus. However, the skull is in
the middle of conglomerate, which is as hard as concrete. I hammer the
rock to see if I can extract the fossil by breaking the rock around it in a
controlled way, but the rock does not budge. The fossil will certainly
shatter if I continue. So, instead, I harden the fossil with glue to protect
it from weathering and make a note in my fieldbook. This whale skull
will remain alone for another year in the wilds of Pakistan, till I can
return with heavier tools when I have money to come here again. Or
rather, if I get money to come back here again.
a walking whale
A few days later, we sit down for our lunch: dry gasoline-scented chap-
pati s with jam wrapped in newspaper, the newsprint readable in mirror
image on the bread, because grease leached into it from the paper. Des-
sert is some nicely wrapped cookies from a store in Islamabad. We sit
with our backs against a marine limestone that forms a ledge and com-
forts our backs, which hurt from carrying a backpack full of water and
fossils and hunching over all morning. Sitting comfortably, I notice
something blue against the gray rocks. It is a shark tooth, its enamel
stained blue and white by erosion. This is not very important scientifi-
cally, but it brightens my day anyway, as fossils have been sparse today.
As I put it away, there is another blue tooth, this time of a reef fish, with
its heavy teeth and jaws, used to crush shellfish and clams. As I look up,
there is a third fish tooth, all collected while I haven’t even moved. It is
puzzling to have all these vertebrates in marine rocks, while the river
deposits are not nearly as fossiliferous. Should we spend more time in
the marine rocks to collect fossils there?
We decide to work half-days on the fossil seafloor and the other half
in freshwater rocks. As the fieldwork draws to a close, Jamil drops us in
valley A, where there is a layer with lots of clam and snail shells braced
by a blocky sandstone ridge of the Murree Formation. We walk along
42 | Chapter 3
our mollusc bed, eyes to the ground. These molluscs lived in the Tethys
Sea, a shallow sea that separated the Indian continent from Asia. Arif
and I walk along the ridge, parallel to each other, keeping a distance so
as to cover as much ground as possible.
Twenty minutes after we left the car, I find a distal femur, the knee-
part of the thighbone, the first fossil of the day. It belongs to a beast the
size of a cow, and clearly a mammal. The rocks indicate that this is a
fossil seafloor, but I know of no marine mammal with knees like this. It
is not a whale or a seacow; those have rudimentary knees or none at all.
There is a group of mammals known from Pakistan that are thought to
be closely related to elephants and seacows and maybe ancestral to
them. No skeleton is known for these anthracobunids—this could be it.
An exciting prospect.
I set down my backpack and crawl on my knees through the little
valley. A thorny bush tears my shirt, and another one pulls off my hat
and hooks my skin. Another fossil shows up: a proximal tibia, the other
half of the knee joint. They are clearly from the same animal—perfect
fit, same size, same sediment attached to them. This increases my excite-
ment, because it shows that this was not just an isolated bone washing
around in the ocean. The two bones stayed together, and I am hoping
that they are part of an entire dead body that was fossilized here. Over
time, two more pieces appear, both of the femur, but nothing nice. After
forty-five minutes, Arif, who initially had slowed and was searching
nearby so as to not get too far ahead, is moving on, eyes on the ground.
An hour, and still nothing. I have to give up. I am disappointed. Nothing
about this knee joint can tell me what this beast was. “Mammal,” my
fieldbook reports blandly, admitting defeat.
Arif calls me over. He has a green rock the size of a cereal box, with
pieces of two bones. They share a joint and articulate as they would in
the animal. I cringe. It is another knee, the proximal tibia and the distal
femur, much smaller than the one I found earlier, and a painful reminder
that I just wasted an hour. I try to suppress visions of working hard all
day to come home with just two unidentifiable mammalian knees. I ask
Arif where he found it. He points vaguely to the edge of the ridge he was
walking on earlier. I do not want to deal with this now.
“Let’s go on and keep working. We’ll come back at the end of the
day, on the way back to the car, and look for more of this beast.”
Arif agrees. We walk on, eat our newspaper-wrapped lunch, and turn
around in the mid-afternoon, toward the road, while covering new
ground. Our bags are lighter now, because we’ve drunk most of the
A Whale with Legs | 43
water we brought. Arif shows me the site of his knee. It is littered with
fossil bone. It is immediately clear that this is much better than my site
from this morning. There are ribs, phalanges, and pieces of larger bones,
all in gray-green rock. This could be big. Maybe it is the first skeleton
ever of an anthracobunid, and it may make it possible to study the rela-
tions between elephants and seacows. But there is no time to think
about that now. It is time to start the excavation.
The bones are spread out over a small surface. This is a good sign: it
means that erosion has not uncovered and disturbed a lot of the skele-
ton. First, we pick up all the loose bones at the surface, so that we do
not trample them or cover them with dirt as we start to dig. The bones
are weathering out of a green siltstone. It is hard, but not very hard. The
layers are part of a vertical ledge. It is narrow and uncomfortable to
stand here. As we inspect the site, we both take several involuntary
slides down into the valley. After we’ve picked up all the loose fossils,
the sun is about to drop behind the black Murree crest. This excavation
> will last many hours. The poor light forces us to go back to the road and
head to the guesthouse.
The next day, we go immediately to the site, where I take notes. It is
now locality 9209. I sketch rocks and layers in my fieldbook. We start
to dig, and bones emerge immediately. There is a femur, of the opposite
side from Arif’s knee yesterday. That is great news, as it means that the
fossil consists of more than just a single limb. We keep on digging,
intensely concentrated. I try to keep notes, but it is hard not to get
caught up in the excitement of the dig. We drip thin glue to harden fos-
sils, and thick white glue to fill cracks. More notes, more excavation,
waiting for more glue to dry. Our lunch is rushed; we want to dig. Two
bones are in a block next to each other: radius and ulna, the bones
between elbow and wrist. That is really exciting, a forelimb now, with
wrist and hand bones, even. The rock is so hard that I need to take out
the entire block and take it home, where I can use power tools to extract
the fossils. That idea is scary, because I do not have the money to take
extra luggage. But it is not a problem that I want to think about now.
Part of the fossil is articulated, and the positional information will
help us to identify bones. I write numbers on each bone and draw maps
in my fieldbook. My photos are poor, with irregular shadows covering
the specimen. I am not a patient photographer.
We dig all day. Arif and I sit shoulder to shoulder on the ledge. It is
addictive. Each new bone brings a high and makes us want more. We fin-
ish when it gets dark, exhausted but thoroughly satisfied. Conspicuous by
44 | Chapter 3
its absence is the skull. The thought occurs to me that this is a beautiful
skeleton without a head. That would make it very difficult to identify
with certainty. Hopefully, the skull is still buried.
We come back the next day, and the process repeats itself. Halfway
through the day, a herd of goats walks into the valley, long ears hanging
down the sides of their heads, curved horns. They walk and eat, nibble the
shrubs, and look in puzzlement at the two weird beings sitting in the dirt.
They are not scared, and several times we have to shoo them away from
our site. An old man is herding them. He is across from us in the valley,
dirty blue checkered turban and long gray beard, and dressed in shirt and
dhoti, a loin cloth that drapes down to his shoes. He carries a long walk-
ing stick that doubles as a club to steer recalcitrant goats. He comes near.
“As-salamu alaykum,” Arif greets him.
“Wa alaykumu s-salam.” He returns the greeting in a voice crackling
with age.
Arif goes up the ledge to talk to him, but he walks closer. He looks at
the bones we have excavated, picks some up and puts them down, and
then walks over to me. His hand reaches to a bone still in the rock. He
wants to pick it up.
“Ney, ney,” I say emphatically, and he pulls his hand back, startled.
He and Arif talk for a while. I cannot understand him, and keep
working. He asks the same question several times, and Arif answers it
differently each time, patiently clarifying. Eventually, the shepherd
leaves.
“Man is poor,” says Arif.
“He has at least thirty goats.”
“Ahh, goats are all goats from village, he is just herder.”
That makes sense. They pool their goats for grazing purposes, so that
it just takes a single person to deal with the day’s grazing chore.
“What did he ask?”
“He asked if we find gold.”
I set down my tools. This is bad news. If the villagers think we’re
finding gold, all kinds of things could happen. They could come and dig
themselves, to share in the riches. They could ask us to give them some,
or they could get the authorities to investigate, and it would take time
to explain.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said, we people are government officers, doing important survey,
no gold.”
A Whale with Legs | 45
I don’t reply. It seems like that statement would raise more suspicion,
but I also trust Arif’s judgment. The excavation continues, and Arif runs
into a bone that is the length of his hand. With a dentist’s scraper and a
brush, I set to work to excavate it. Suddenly, I realize that this is the bot-
tom edge of a lower jaw. There will be teeth, maybe even a skull. I will
be able to identify this beast. I keep on working, not even telling Arif
what this is, I am too tense. A black shiny surface protrudes above the
dull tan bone—tooth enamel! I will know what this beast is! More of
the skull is exposed, and it is embedded in hard green rock. No worries,
the drill in the lab will take care of it, although it means that I will not
get a good look at the teeth today.
We keep working at it, scraping and gluing. Eventually, we put the
skull in a full plaster jacket, as if it were a broken leg, to protect it dur-
ing transportation. The white plaster stands out from far away against
the drab hills. We need to leave, because it is getting dark.
This worries me. I once collected fossils in a desolate desert miles
from where people lived. We put a jacket on a lovely skeleton, and the
next day, when we came back, the jacket had been pulled off and the
bones scattered across the hill. It was inconceivable that in one evening
and one early morning someone actually had walked by this out-of-the-
way place, pulled off the jacket, and broken the fossil as well as my
heart. The Kala Chitta Hills are much more populated. Someone cer-
tainly will see it here.
I consider covering the specimen with dirt. Arif argues against that. It
will disrupt the rest of our excavation; there are still more bones buried.
He is right. He pulls a sheet of paper out of my notebook, and writes, in
the curly Arabic script that Urdu uses, “danger, explosive.” He puts the
paper on the jacket, and a rock on top of that to keep it down. The
statement seems such an obviously silly lie that nobody will believe it.
Arif disagrees, pointing out that local people do not use plaster, so they
do not recognize the material, and that poor village folks respect author-
ity. I again trust Arif’s insight into the local people’s psyche, and we
leave the skull exposed. Still, I go to bed with a nagging feeling in my
stomach.
We are back the next morning, and Arif was right: the cast is undis-
turbed, the note still on top. By mid-afternoon, all exposed fossils have
been removed and packed and a map made of the position of the fossils
(figure 18). We spend another hour digging, but do not find more fossils,
and call it a day. We cover the site with loose rock to protect it from being
trampled by herders and their flocks, and we return to the guesthouse.
46 | Chapter 3
Ambulocetus natans
The Walking Whale
femur
H-GSP 18507
forearm and hand
hyoid
foot
skull
ribs and
lower jaw
vertebrae from the
compressed chest
left pelvis
hammer is
30 cm long
sacrum
right pelvis
figure 18. Map of Ambulocetus excavation (locality H-GSP 9209). The fossil
was in a nearly vertically oriented layer (see figure 19). The chest was deeper in the
rock (lower on this drawing) and was not excavated until a few years after the
initial finds. After S. I. Madar, J. G. M. Thewissen, and S. T. Hussain, “Additional
Holotype Remains of Ambulocetus natans (Cetacea, Ambulocetidae), and Their
Implications for Locomotion in Early Whales,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
22 (2002): 405–22.
It bothers me that it is not clear what kind of beast this is, and it also
bothers me that I will have to wait until the skull comes out of the jacket
to find out. It will be months from now. I try to numb my frustration by
imagining that it is probably an anthracobunid. They must have had a
heavy skeleton; their teeth are known from these rocks; and they lived
in the ocean.
My frustration grows as I wash myself on the porch with a half a
bucket of warm water, undressing only partially against the cold and
A Whale with Legs | 47
to preserve modesty. The fossil bugs me. I think of myself as a patient
person, but temptation is too strong here. Four days of work excavating