Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Dinner with Cope and Marsh
The search for fossils was abandoned the next day in feverish preparation for Marsh. The camp was
cleaned, clothes and bodies washed. Sternberg shot a deer for dinner and Cookie roasted it.
Cope was busy with preparations of his own. He picked through the piles of fossils they had found,
selecting a piece here, a piece there, setting them aside.
Johnson asked if he could help, but Cope shook his head. “This is a job for an expert.”
“You are selecting finds to show Marsh?”
“In a way. I am making a new creature: Dinosaurus marshiensis vulgaris.”
By the end of the day he had assembled from fragments a passable skull, with two horned
projections that stuck out laterally from the jaw like curving tusks.
Isaac said it looked like a wild boar, or a warthog.
“Exactly,” Cope said, excited. “A prehistoric porcine giant. A piglike dinosaur! A pig for a pig!”
“It’s nice,” Sternberg allowed, “but it won’t stand close scrutiny from Marsh.”
“It won’t have to.”
Cope ordered them to lift the skull, which was held together with paste, and under his instructions
they moved it first farther from the fire, then closer, then farther again. Next to one side, and to
another. Cope stood by the fire, squinted, and then ordered it moved again.
“He’s like a woman decorating his house, and we’re movin’ the furniture,” Cookie said, panting.
It was late afternoon when Cope pronounced himself satisfied with the skull’s position. They all
went off to clean up, and Little Wind was dispatched to invite the other camp to join them for dinner.
He returned a few minutes later to say that three riders were approaching the camp.
Cope smiled grimly. “I should have known he’d invite himself.”
“There was a theatrical aspect to both men,” observed Sternberg, who had worked for both,
“although it manifested differently. Professor Marsh was heavy and solemn, a man of judicious
pauses. He spoke slowly and had a way of making the listener hang on his next words. Professor
Cope was the opposite—his words came in a tumbling rush, his movements were quick and nervous,
and he captivated attention as a hummingbird does, so brilliantly quick you did not want to miss
anything. At this meeting—the only face-to-face encounter I ever witnessed—it was clear no love
was lost between them, though they were at pains to hide this fact in frosty Eastern formality.”
“To what do we owe this honor, Professor Marsh?” Cope asked when the three men had ridden into
camp and dismounted.