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Argentina
Valley of the
dinosaurs
A vulture rides the hot, blue currents overhead as we crawl over the baked earth looking for bones. Nose to the ground, sun beating on back, I sift the pale sand until something dark and shiny catches my eye. I brush away the earth to reveal a black fang, two-inches long, needle-sharp, perfect. I feel a surge of pride. My first dinosaur tooth.
I shouldn't really be here. I should be studying temple monkeys in Sri Lanka but I left it too late to get on that project. Earthwatch supports over 120 research projects worldwide but the ones which involve cute animals like monkeys, orang-utans and dolphins tend to fill up first. When I ring to book, I'm told there are still a few places left on 'Caterpillars of Costa Rica', the 'Lost Water of Inner Mongolia' or 'Triassic Park' which at least holds out the possibility of being chased by mutant velociraptors. Ignoring the nagging voice in my head which tells me the reason there are still places left on this is because it involves 'arduous chiselling' and camping for two weeks in a desert with no running water and no toilets, I sign on the dotted line. Six weeks later I'm in a dusty pick-up truck with Dr Oscar Alcober and Ricardo Martinez from the Museum of Natural Sciences in San Juan, attempting to drink scalding mate , the bitter leaf tea so beloved of Argentinians, from a wooden cup as we bump over desert tracks, Queen's Greatest Hits blasting over the stereo.
' Welcome to your new home,' says Oscar. Two hundred and twenty million years ago, this desiccated dust bowl was a lush, swampy floodplain covered with huge ferns, the air alive with the buzzing of dragonflies. This was the Triassic period when the first dinosaurs emerged, and it is the fossilised remains of these primitive creatures at the very root of the dinosaur family tree, which have put Ischigualasto on the map. In 1991 Ricardo struck gold, or rather bone, with the discovery of a three-foot long skeleton of a light-footed predator. He had a hunch this was something new and important and he was right. It was eoraptor, one of the earliest dinosaurs ever to be recorded. Teams from the Museum of Natural Sciences have been back every year since, and now that the museum's funding has been cut by Argentina's bankrupt government, the fieldwork is entirely funded by Earthwatch volunteers.
Once Oscar has decided which of the finds are worth excavating, the hard work begins. In many ways, extracting fossils is like doing a 1,000-piece jigsaw: painstaking, neck-aching, boring at times, but mind-calming and curiously satisfying. As we brush, probe and scrape, we chat idly about football, fossils and the Falklands War. We practise our Spanish on the students from the University of San Juan who are here to help with the fieldwork and they practise their English on us. We laugh a lot. Ricardo takes us to see the skull of a cynodont jutting grimly from the side of a sandstone cliff, jaws clamped shut, teeth intact. It takes us two days to prize the reddish brown skull from its 200 million-year-old resting place. I almost feel sorry for it. As the bones are uncovered, we wrap them in plaster to protect them. This packet of earth and bone will be taken back to the museum in San Juan to be cleaned, studied and eventually displayed in a glass case.
But I have fallen under the spell of this place of sand, stone, sky and bone, where mobile phones don't work and newspapers don't get delivered. And though the work is occasionally hot and the chiselling is indeed arduous, I can't remember when I last felt so relaxed. When the heat becomes unbearable, we pile on to the back of the truck and head for a nearby waterhole. It's a 40-minute hike down a steep ravine to slide down a mudchute into the cool brown water but after a week in the desert, it feels like heaven. Our days are spent on all fours studying the dirt, but our nights are spent looking at the stars. The sky's so bright it seems to throb. After dinner (red meat, red wine - this is Argentina) Clay, who works at the Rose Space Centre in New York, points out the Milky Way, Mars, the Magellanic Clouds and the Southern Crown. We 'ooh' and 'aah' at shooting stars. One night we tell ghost stories while an electric storm lights up the
horizon and on another we switch on the truck radio and dance around the
campfire to the fast and furious cuarteto music under a glitterball moon.
The next day, my head throbbing, I am sitting in the sun up to my elbows in wet plaster, bandaging a dinosaur tail. 'Call this a holiday?' jokes one of the other volunteers as they stagger past carrying an armful of shovels. No. But it's a pretty good substitute. Factfile Triassic Park 2002 team dates are: Team 1, 1-13 September; Team 2, 15-27 September; Team 3, 29 September-11 October. The cost of £1,295 includes transfers from San Juan to Ischigualasto, camp food and drink but not flights. British Airways (0845 7733377) has five flights a week from Gatwick to Buenos Aires. Aerolineas Argentinas (0845 6011915) has five flights a week from Buenos Aires to San Juan. Alternatively Trailfinders (020 7938 3366) has competitive through fares on a variety of routes and carriers. Earthwatch Institute (01865 318838) supports more than 120 research projects worldwide. Volunteers pay to join the project, usually for a minimum of two weeks, and make their own travel arrangements. For most projects,no specialist knowledge is required. |
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It's not that
far-fetched a fantasy. There is a tantalisingly real possibility that one
of us may find something significant in this prehistoric graveyard. We are
the third group of volunteers to join this particular field trip and the
previous two teams have already found a skull which may belong to a new
species of early mammal, three baby rhynchosaurs (odd, beaked reptiles
which lived at the same time as the dinosaurs) and the beautifully
preserved skeleton of a primitive dinosaur, herrerasaurus. 
By
the second week desert life is starting to take its toll. My eyes feel
like toast, my alarm clock has melted and I'm running dangerously low on
Wet Ones. There is sand engrained in my soap, on the inside of my torch
and forming small dunes in my sleeping bag. 'How can you live like this?'
asks Linda, who is an old hand at dinosaur digs and has brought a
four-person tent, complete with front porch, portable shower, a bedside
rug and a crate of avocados. There's no sand in her tent. 