Stories Set in Stone: Fossils of Love, War, and Motherhood

So welcome to Stories Set in Stone, where I will be showing you tonight the fossilized stories of love, war, and motherhood.

Misery Makes for Odd Company

We begin at the dawn of the Triassic, some 250 million years ago. To set the stage, the Triassic was a turbulent time in the history of life on Earth. Before it came a mass extinction that wiped out so much of ancient life and was such a biological catastrophe that it was called “The Great Dying,” the Permian extinction.

From the acidification of the oceans to the rapid shifts in climate of the supercontinent Pangaea, times were tough for those who were alive at this time. Our first story takes place at the Karoo Basin of what is now South Africa, where humid monsoons swung wildly into periods of extreme drought within a single year.

Meet the Broomistega. It was an amphibian, in a time that was likely the most inhospitable for its kind. The arid seasons of the Triassic weren’t kind to the Broomistega. Its soft reptilian skin wasn’t built to fend off the harsh gaze of sunlight, and it often needed to hide under burrows of other creatures for safety.

These days were even worse for our little Broomistega. Just a few weeks ago some unknown creature had injured it by its side. Its ribs had half-healed but it was still hard for it to breathe, and let alone move under the sharp Triassic sun. It was looking for somewhere safe, somewhere cold, a safehaven where it could recover from both the weather and from predators.

Thankfully, it spotted just that. A hole in the ground it could hide under. But little did it know, there was already someone living inside!

There, it met the Thrinaxodon. It was a proto-mammal, an odd transitional mix between reptile and mammal. And because of this unique mixture, the Thrinaxodon was capable of two things that the Broomistega couldn’t do: dig its own den, and estivate, which is just a fancy science word for hibernating but for dry seasons instead of winter.

When the Broomistega crawled into the burrow, the Thrinaxodon wasn’t awake. It was in a deep state of slumber, sleeping out the season until better days return. The burrow was cold, and small enough that larger predators couldn’t intrude them inside. It was perfect! Beside the sleeping mammal, the Broomistega sat in rest, finally safe from the burning gaze of the sun and from whatever other creature gave it its wound.

But this is where our story ends. In the darkness of this burrow, the two unlikely companions slept together, died together, and were fossilized together. A flash flood raged and muddy waters ran down the burrow, drowning the unlikely bedfellows.

Millions of years later, we would uncover their remains, entombed in the image you see before you. An embrace that has lasted for a quarter of a billion years.

Immortal Combat

Our next story takes us forward 150 million years from the last one, welcome to the Late Cretaceous. In what is now the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, we find ourselves right on the edge of the end of the dinosaurs. The Late Cretaceous was home to some of the most recognizable dinosaurs of today’s modern age, the Triceratops, three-horned beasts armed with shields for a face; the Brachiosaurus, towering giants with necks that reached for the stars; and even the world-famous Tyrannosaurus Rex, the tyrant king of the dinosaurs.

But it was also home to one of the two stars of this story: the velociraptor. The Velociraptor Mongoliensis, differed from its fictional counterpart in the Jurassic Park series, was less of a man-sized monster and more of a chicken-sized pack predator. It stood about as tall as your knees, on its swift hind legs, its whole body covered in feathery quills that gave it grace in the sand dunes that it called home.

Its neighbors in these sand dunes, and most often its prey, were the Protoceratops. Unlike the Velociraptor, it was a quadrupedal creature. On all its four legs, it walked the late Cretaceous sands carrying the bony frill that guarded its neck like built-in armor.

It was a wet and rainy day when these two animals met. Kindness is alien to these creatures, and so they did nothing else but fight for their lives.

It was raining heavily, then. The sands around them were unstable, shifting wildly beneath their feet. The Velociraptor jumped, lunging for the Protoceratops’ neck, but its frills kept it safe. The Protoceratops thrashed its head left to right, making sure there were no openings for the Velociraptor to hit its soft underbody. In their struggle, the Protoceratops found an upper hand—it caught the raptor’s right arm, biting down tight and breaking it by its strong bony beak. The Velociraptor was in pain, but it wasn’t out for the count. In this position, the Velociraptor saw its own opening, and slashed at the Protoceratops’ neck, slicing its carotid artery by its long raptor-foot claws. They were both injured now, the Velociraptor with a shattered right arm and the Protoceratops with a severed neck artery.

They were locked together, and will forever be tangled in their immortal combat. While they fought, the heavy rains had washed the dunes over them. Quickly and smoothly, the sands immortalized them like this, in a desperate struggle across the eons.

Millions of years later, long after their own kind were wiped from the face of the Earth, we would find them in the desert still stuck in this stance, the ultimate dinosaur death match.

The Case of the Egg Thief

Our last story tonight is the story of a criminal. We find ourselves still in the Late Cretaceous, the last few million years of the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth. In the continent of Asia lived the Oviraptor.

The Oviraptor was a neighbor to the Protoceratops and the Velociraptor. Standing about as tall as a shorter-than-average human, she walked the plains of the late Cretaceous on her two hind legs, with a layer of feathery plumage shielding her from the weather.

Her name, Oviraptor, comes from Greek and translates to “Egg Thief.” The origin of this name comes from her discovery by Roy Chapman Andrews, when she was found as a Cretaceous criminal caught in the act. She was found like so, holding in her claws a nest of eggs, believed to have been the children of another Protoceratops.

And so, for years, she was considered like so, a vicious animal that stalked the nests of others, broke their fragile egg shells with her pointed bony beak, and sucked the unborn young from within. A dinosaurian version of our Aswang.

But the discovery of her thievery isn’t where our story ends. It lies long after Andrews’ first expedition, when a group of paleontologists came back to her remains and made a breakthrough that changed her story.

When paleontologists returned to the Gobi Desert, they found plenty more samples of fossilized eggs like the one the Oviraptor was first found clutching in its grasps. With a mix of luck and better technology than what Andrews had in 1923, they exonerated the Oviraptor from crimes it did not commit.

It turns out that Andrews’ discovery in 1923 wasn’t that of an animal in the midst of stealing another’s eggs—it was of a mother protecting her own. The specimen wasn’t a thief that died in the middle of a crime. It was a mother willing to shield its children from whatever monstrous landslide or unrelenting storm it faced, and died in this endeavor. A mother so loving of her unhatched eggs that she covered them with her own body, in the hopes that they might survive even if she would not.

The Oviraptor is not a thief. She was a mother that loved her children enough to face her death for their survival—a mother that deserves a better name.

What Now?

The point of this presentation isn’t to argue for the Oviraptor to be given a change in name—that’s for the professionals to argue about.

But what I do have to say is this: the story of the misunderstood egg thief, the dueling dinosaurs of the Cretaceous, and the odd couple of the Triassic are not at all unique. Throughout the course of the 3.1 billion years of life’s existence on this beautiful blue marble, countless stories have been explored, and yet a lot of them lost to the sands of time.

But at least, not all of them. Deep underneath the layers of sediment and soil, lie countless stories yet to be told.

So let’s cherish the stories that do make it—the stories that time forgot to erase. All of the fossils I showed you tonight were stories of love, war, and motherhood millions of years in the making. And now that we’re at the end of our storytelling session, which one was your favorite?