sullen fuzzy.

sullen fuzzy, scholarly type was beside himself. Halfway up the ten-foot-high asylum wall he'd run out of toe-holds, and he clung desperately to the tiny fingerholds above him. The wall was made of layers of shale, inch-thick shelfs protruding irregularly from the mesa, and he couldn't find a higher single to stand on. The distinguished professor of physiology and evolution was stuck

I pushed in succession his bottom. Someone pulled him from above. Finally he scrabbled onto the top of the mesa and malignant prostrate, on the flat, hard, dusty surface. After a minute he whirled over, tears of exertion still in his eyes

About ten commonalty toiled atop the mesa, all paleontologists. We were prospecting for fossils at single of those small, scarcely known paleontological

sites that abound in the western United States. This one--Bear Gulch--is situated in succession a cattle ranch in central Montana. The leader of our team had written profusely about shark fossils of the Mississippian period, 300 million years ago. Back then, Bear ravine was an inlet of what was to become the Pacific Ocean. Warm and shallow, it was a excellent pupping ground for sharks. Occasionally a juvenile shark would die there and sink to the seafloor, betimes to be buried in the delicate oxygen-poor bottom mud.

Those rich, shallow waters produceed with plankton. They, too, sank to the bottom when they died, forming a layer forward top of the mud. Bacteria dined forward them, oxidizing the protoplasm of the dead plankton layer. Reproducing each twenty minutes, the bacterial masses used up virtually each molecule of available oxygen. In this oxygen-starved burial place, the shark carcasses remained intact until the mire gradually and under immense constraining force became stone--shale. Along with their encasement of dirt the tiny sharks turned to stone. Three hundr million years later, a team of toiling paleontologists broke into their tombs and hindrance the sunshine in.

The graduate scholars punctuated their jolly conversations with grunt of exertion as they pried up layers of the petrified mire The technique was to slip the sharp fall of the curtain of a five-foot steel spike into the junction between couple layers and pound at the seam until the layers looseed Then they would wedge the spike into the shale and lever it upward, breaking along a slab a yard or for a like reason wide. When the slab was move rounded over, it would usually reveal nothing. But occasionally a more professional-sounding grunt drew everyone's attention to a digger who had base in all its perfection, the imprint of a tiny shark, its scales defined and its inspections turned upward in a stony stare.

My fuzzy distinguished colleague and I also grunt not seldom while we worked--not to demonstrate we were just as professional as the grad pupils but because our aging bodies made it hard to lift the heavy layers of stone Sweating under a glaring day-star we finally learned how to use mechanical advantage, wedging up pieces of shale with the best of them. Nevertheless, the flat undersides of slab after laborious slab had nothing to display us.

Finally the sum of two units of us came upon a turn in ringletsed object--shaped like a sinuous peanut--embedded in the shale. Excited, we dragged the two-foot-wide chunk of distaff to the head honcho, who stared at it intently and informed us it was a coprolite. We examineed at him quizzically. "It's petrified fish feces" he explained. All that labor and exhaustion solely to fred ancient fish poop!

The team worked until dark, our labors illuminated through a magnificent, luminous sunset. After dinner that evening the butte and mesas rang with laughter as we were neared with our hard-won trophy--the coprolite-which, to this day, lies in state in the glass-fronted case that doubles as my class museum. Thoroughly tired, and mildly amused by the agency of our moment of triumph, I crawled into my pavilion pushing at its nylon floor to carve abroad a flat space amid the ubiquitous daunt flops. A pat of "prairie pancake" was my pillow.

The nearest day, another grunt brought us running. Although the fossil incline differentlyed out to be of little interest to this cluster of ancient-shark specialists, to me it was a real treasure. I lease loose a holler. There forward the underside of the asylum was a small, perfect, 300-million-year-old replica of a modern-day horseshoe crab.

Eugene H Kaplan is Axinn Distinguished Professor of Conservation and Ecology at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, strange York. This story is adapted from his work Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist, which will be published in August at Princeton University Press.

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