Salvage Paleontology on the Seaway

摘要

On an embankment hewn from the jungle during the construction of the Panama Canal a century ago, Jason Bourque sits hunched over a 19-million-year-old turtle. Under a broiling midday sun, Bourque spends a half hour patiently brushing away grit from a fractured black carapace the size of a dinner plate before covering it in a plaster bandage for removal. By the time he's finished, a dozen or so container ships, oil tankers, and other vessels steam past along the 77-kilometer-long seaway. Bourque, a preparator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is taking advantage of a fossil windfall. As part of a 55.5 billion expansion of the canal that will move 152 million cubic meters of earth, the canal authority has opened up sections of the seaway to salvage paleontology: collecting fossils in newly exposed rock faces. "It's a once-in-century opportunity," says Bruce MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, run by the University of Florida in Gainesville, and director of the Panama Canal Project.