The American members of the team include both paleontologists and
geologists. Mary Dawson, my colleague at the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History, specializes in the early evolution of rodents, rabbits, and
their kin. Her role in the discovery of the first Eocene vertebrates north
of the Arctic Circle, on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic archipelago,
has won her widespread acclaim. John Kappelman, an anthropologist
from the University of Texas, is a leading expert on the later phases
of higher primate evolution, especially the evolution of apes during the
Miocene Epoch. John’s role in our expedition relates to his other professional
hat, that of paleomagnetic stratigrapher. Together with Wulf
Gose, a geologist from the University of Texas, and Tim Ryan, his graduate
student, Kappelman hopes to determine the age of the fossils we
find, using the episodic reversals in the Earth’s magnetic field as a guide.
Wen Chaohua, a peasant farmer from the neighboring village of Zhaili,
rounds out our field crew. I first met Mr. Wen the previous year, when
we hired him as a manual laborer. Slight of build but surprisingly strong,
Wen rapidly earned a spot on our team because of his solid work habits,
his quick smile, and his unbridled enthusiasm for finding fossils. Though
Wen has only the minimal educational background typical of rural Chinese
of his generation, he shows plenty of raw intelligence. Had he been
fortunate enough to grow up under different circumstances, I’m sure Wen
could have been successful in almost any endeavor he chose to pursue.
This year, Wen looks positively professorial wearing his new eyeglasses,
which correct a minor astigmatism that had bothered him last year. Like
me, Wen sports a small hand lens tied around his neck, which he uses to
examine small fossils up close. In recognition of his hard work, Mary
Dawson gave Wen her own hand lens at the conclusion of our previous
field season. Now that he has the standard tools of the trade, Wen takes
even greater pride in his work. Our reward is a steady stream of fossils.
Wen’s role on our field crew is simply to extract large blocks of fossilbearing
rock from the bottom of the ravine. Other members of the team
then break each block down more finely in search of any fossils that might
lie inside. Wen’s tool of choice for this enterprise is a large, steel rock
pick hafted onto a stout wooden handle. This Wen wields with all of the
exuberance of a forty-niner searching for a vein of gold. Invariably, Wen

himself uncovers many fossils, simply because he exposes so much fresh
fossil-bearing rock with each powerful swing of his pick. At first, it was
hard to restrain Wen from attempting to extricate the fossils he encountered
during his daily assault on the layers of limestone and mudstone.
Now, with a field season of experience under his belt, Wen understands
that whenever he happens across a fossil, he must stop his work and alert
the rest of the team.