anything?”
“What do you say, Joanne? Can you use a few more sifters?”
“Are you kidding? I never turn down a free set of hands.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” the professor replied. “See you later, girls.”
True to her word, Joanne showed the three of them how to sift huge amounts of dirt through finer and finer mesh boxes. At first the girls were all enthralled, waiting for the sand to reveal some long-buried treasure, but as the day wore on and nothing significant surfaced, Lisa noticed Carole looking bored and Kate pausing to stretch her back more and more often. Finally Joanne reappeared.
“Sorry, guys, I got caught up in something.” She observed the size of the pile of dirt they had sifted and seemed impressed.
“I don’t know if we found anything important, but Isaved everything that looked even slightly unusual,” Lisa informed her, pointing to a box.
“I told her they were only rocks and pebbles, but she insisted,” Carole grumbled.
Lisa gave Carole a withering look and eagerly accompanied Joanne over to the box. To her disappointment, Carole turned out to be right. There were no dinosaur bones to be found, not even a lizard tooth.
Nevertheless, Joanne seemed very pleased with her attention to detail. “You know, Lisa, you may have the kind of patience it takes to be a good archaeologist.”
Lisa beamed. “I’ve never really considered it as a career before.”
Joanne looked at the other girls, who appeared to be quickly wilting in the heat of the day. “Why don’t you two take a break,” she suggested. “We have some cold refreshments in one of the tents.”
Carole and Kate nodded gratefully.
“Lisa, would you like to help me with something else? It takes patience, but personally it’s one of my favorite things to do on a dig.”
Lisa was flattered to be asked. “I’d love to.”
“Okay. Get yourself a quick drink and meet me at section eighty-five.” Joanne pointed to a particular lot staked out with ropes.
The refreshment tent wasn’t hard to find. The outside consisted of a raised awning that sheltered a few folding tables and chairs. Inside there were chests of iced sodas and large containers of fresh water. The girls helped themselves, then collapsed at a table in the shade.
“You don’t look so good, Kate,” Carole said.
Kate mopped at her face with her neckerchief. “I’m fine, but after sweating in the sun, this wind is giving me the shivers,” she said irritably.
Lisa wasn’t sure what to make of that. She was grateful for the slightest breeze. She finished her water and stood up. “I have to go help Joanne. I’ll find you in a little while.”
The two girls waved her off, and she made her way back to where Joanne was waiting.
“Good for you, Lisa. I like promptness in a person. Now look what we’ve got here.…”
Lisa knelt down and her eyes went wide. A genuine skeleton! “What is it?”
“An ancient species of bird.”
“How do you know it’s not one that died here a year ago?”
“The depth at which it was found gives us an idea of how long it’s been here. The deeper down in the dirt, the older it is. In theory, at least,” Joanne told her.“See the delicate bones of the wing? We need to expose the rest of them.”
“Wow!” Lisa said excitedly. “How do we get it out of the dirt?”
“We don’t. We want to remove the dirt from it and leave the body just the way we found it until it can be photographed.”
“Why?”
Joanne smiled at her. “You have an inquiring mind, Lisa. That’s a real gift. The answer is that the position of the body can give us clues as to how it died.”
Lisa shook her head. “What do you mean, how it died?”
“For instance, did it break its neck or did it simply die of natural causes? Maybe something killed it and ate it, and if that’s the case, we might be able to figure out what the predator was by any tooth marks it may have left on the bones. That would help us deduce what
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