"This seems like a nice spot. Good rocks, the gorge is relatively deep and has several strata of rock," noted the Professor.
"That's all well and good, sir, but won't it be difficult to get down there? It looks steep, and this is quite a bit of equipment," groaned one of the hired porters.
"Well, I certainly don't care. It's not as though
I've got to carry anything, you know." Turning around, the academic noted the shocked and furious expression of the man behind him, struggling under his immense weight. Quickly, he added, "Of course, I didn't mean that in earnest. I'll help. In fact, we can set down for an hour or so, there's plenty of daylight left. Pass it down the line, and you can have drinks or food or something." He was rewarded as the porter's face noticeably softened, and he yelled in provincial Greek back towards the end of the column of pack-bearers in the hills. Almost simultaneously, the porters sighed and dropped the packs, anxious to get such a load off.
"Well, what do you think, Athanasios? Look like a good spot?" The professor's students were along for the ride, and he asked their opinions frequently to gauge their interest and knowledge, as well as to help them gain field experience. Of course, no one had ever done anything even remotely like this in the history of the world. Looking for bones deep in the ground, hot on the trail of creatures long since moved away...This was hot stuff!
Eagerly, the student clambered down the slope of the ravine with his fellows and called up. "Wow! This is a really deep ravine! It ought to be a great starting point!"
Young, idealistic, full of energy, optimistic...all of these things the Professor lacked. Once again, he thanked God that the university had seen fit to allow his students to come with him into the few remaining wilds of Moesia, once called Bulgaria. "It doesn't look bad at all, does it? Let's rest for awhile, though: these old bones can't take all of this running around!"
A few hours later, a large camp sat in the bottom of the gorge. Fires blazed next to lean-tos and shelters that the porters and students had set up. Night began to fall, and the professor could be found with a torch and a few students, examining the rock wall. "We'll need shovels for all of this. It looks like it hasn't been explored in ages! Nobody really went here before."
"Why not, sir?"
"Well-" he knew he'd have to give a history lesson soon- "no one has really needed to. The Ottomans ignored this part of Bulgaria, because the only reason the Turks would have to go into a heavily forested area was rebellion, or maybe a robber's band. The Bulgar government didn't last long enough to build up the infrastructure necessary to finish settling the forests, and, in a sense, neither have we. During the Krakow War, the soldiers of the Byzantine Army needed to move as fast as they could during the invasion, so they bypassed the large woodland. It's only now, during time of peace, that we can really get into the few unexplored regions of the world and experience the thrill of Discovery."
The students had been dropping off before (one of the Professor's main bones of contention with the university is that no one emphasized history there because it was "boring") the word
discovery, but now their faces were bright and shone in the torchlight. "It's late. We had better sleep. In fact, we've got all season to excavate here."
In the next few weeks, they didn't find much of anything. As the Professor would later remark, "Moesia isn't the best place to find dinosaur bones, you know. Too well-traveled: no dinosaur would have gone here for fear of humans." In the third week of the second month, they actually struck gold during the diggings, and the local government was notified. In return, they got a notice that they had two months to dig (if they didn't find any bones, was the governor's concession) before they were forcibly evicted. Apparently, the Byzantine Empire was as gold-hungry as anyone else. The very next day, a very large bone was found in the wall of the gorge just further up from the vein of gold they had struck.
It was the first vertebra ever found. Further excavation revealed more of a skeleton, and it was not at all consistant with the other bone found near Serdica. The professor was transported. Not only had a new species of animal been discovered, but apparently an entire family of species. But, that couldn't be right, either: the two bone sets very quickly diverged. The second, still-incomplete one showed itself to have no sharp claws or teeth, but large teeth, best suited for grinding things down. A difference between herbivore and carnivore, as the first find was supposed to be (especially since the discovery of proportional sharp teeth in the Serdica region near the leg bone) would be enormous, an
order-level difference, or even...dare it be suggested...
class? (OOC: Okay, so I'm not Disenfranchised, who apparently knows biology.
) An entire
class...his name would be in history books!
Anyway, after finally assembling what the students could of the skeleton, he sat down to classify it. Notochord...that meant
Chordata phylum. Going further down the list, the animal was a vertebrate, and also a jaw:
Gnathostomata.
This is exciting as hell... Four limbs:
Tetrapoda. Then...he supposed
Dinosauria would go here, after, naturally, classifying them as
Reptilia.
Ah, the stimulation and wonder of paleobiological discovery!
. Oh well, more credit to you.
@notochords: Vertebrate adults don't have them, and they don't fossilise like bones, you'd only be able to locate them at soft tissue sites.
