Some news stories are ambiguous enough to suggest a fantastic alternative. Take the high school teacher who found T-Rex footprints in North Dakota. Fossil footprints, right?
“Kent Hups said he couldn’t contain his excitement when he came across several giant three-toed track prints that appeared to be T. Rex footprints in a North Dakota land formation last year.”
The late-September wind came off the Badlands like a parched whistle. Miles from any paved road, high-school science teacher Harmon Voss crouched in a shallow wash and stared at the sight that had stopped him mid-stride.
There in the ground: three-toed. Enormous. The print was a meter and a half long, looking for all the world like a chicken footprint imprinted in the clay if chickens were twenty feet tall.
Harmon had spent twenty years teaching sophomores that Tyrannosaurus rex tracks were almost never found in North Dakota, because the exact mix of conditions needed to preserve a footprint were very rare. Yet here they were: a line of them heading west, each one deeper than the last, as if the animal had made them only an hour ago.
Of course that was preposterous. They must be at least 65 million years old. But Harmon’s mama had taught him never to take anything for granted. So he stood, brushed dust from his knees, and walked back to the truck. From the locked case in back he lifted the .416 Rigby. The rifle was older than most of his students and a gift from his father who had hunted big game in Africa.
He put 4 rounds in the magazine and slid a 400-grain solid into the chamber, and closed the bolt with a sound that seemed to echo through the deep, ancient clay drainage channels. Only then did he follow the tracks.
The thuds began twenty minutes later. They were not footsteps so much as impacts: the sound of something very large getting closer, pausing to look around before moving on again. The vibrations shivered through Harmon’s boot soles. It was unseen but very near.
He crested a low ridge and stopped. The animal stood in the trough beneath him, head lowered, doubling back on the tracks Harmon had been following. It was larger than any reconstruction he had ever shown a class. The hide was the color of wet dark green basalt. The texture like gravel in cement mix. When it lifted its head the eyes were not the grey of textbook illustrations. They were red, the red of a furnace door left ajar.
The T. rex saw him.
Harmon raised the Rigby. The animal started up the ridge, surprisingly quick for something as big as a small house. The ground shivered but he ignored it. He aimed for the lower center chest and fired.
The report rolled across the Badlands like thunder crashing over an ancient Jurassic plain. The dinosaur staggered, then his leg went down beneath him, one massive hind limb kicking twice before it went quiet.
He sat down hard in the dirt rifle across his knees wondering how he would explain this to the school principal. He was still sitting there when the first truck appeared, then the second, green Game, Fish and Parks vehicles kicking up pale dust.
Two officers approached with the unhurried gait of men who had seen everything. “We’re going to need you to come with us.” Harmon looked from the enormous carcass to the officers. “It’s a Tyrannosaurus rex,” he said, as if that explained anything.
“Yes, sir. Federally listed. Endangered. You just shot a protected species on public land.” They cuffed him and took the Rigby as evidence. As they walked him toward the trucks, one of them glanced back at the fallen animal.
“Third one this year,” he said to his partner. “People keep finding the tracks and thinking they’re fossils.”
The wind picked up again, carrying away the smell of cordite and but bringing on the reminder of something every high school teacher should instinctively know. Law enforcement, not hunter gathering or teaching, was the oldest profession in the world. They put him in the back and drove away.