Easy Paleontology

Bill had always wanted to be a paleontologist, but everyone told him it was backbreaking work fraught with disappointment. He'd heard bone diggers complain all the time about researching dig sites, breaking out the picks and shovels, chipping away ever so carefully through layer after layer of rock all on the hopes that they might find some fossil, which they would have to painstakingly excavate over the course of weeks, months, or sometimes longer. They would complain about the risks of shipping the fossils back to universities and museums. They shared horror stories of bones being damaged or lost all together, of skeletons being assembled incorrectly.

He never found it to be particularly difficult. In his experience, skeletons could most reliably be found in museums, particularly natural history museums and children's museums. Often times, there next to the other skeletons that paleontologists had labored for months and years over, he would find a wood frame, already pre-gridded, brushes waiting, and without fail beneath a thin layer of sand, dinosaur bones. He didn't even have to ship them. They were already in the museum. He just brushed aside the dirt and called the display complete before setting off for another museum in another city to do the work others said was so hard. He could do several complete digs in a week.

“Paleontology isn't hard at all,” he would say as he dusted off the dirt of his second skeleton of the day, conveniently located on the fourth floor of the Orlando Science Center. “Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.”

- Originally mailed to S. Johnson in Lafayette, Indiana