Bonehunter - Transcript
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[“Eiseley”]
Few people outside of the realm of Paleontology realize that these runneled, sun-baked ridges which extend far into South Dakota are one of the great fossil beds of the North American age of mammals. Bones lay in the washes or projected from cliffs. Titanithears, dirk-toothed cats, Oreodonts had left their bones in these sterile clays. The place was as haunted as the Valley of the Kings, but by great beasts who had ruled a planet when man was only a wispy experiment in the highlands of Kenya. These creatures had never had the misfortune to look upon a human face. Most of what we knew of mammalian evolution in North America had come from this region. The place enchanted me.
[Narrator]
In the badlands the south party found the bones of strange mammals that had ruled the earth after the dinosaurs were gone. Lyenadon horridus, a wolf-like giant; Boropus had a head like a horse and a rhino-like body; Protocerus resembling an antelope; a primitive camel; and a Tytanophere whose petrified bones were believed by the Lakota Indians to be the remains of a spiritual being they called The Thunder-horse.
[“Eiseley”]
Some lands are flat and grass-covered and smile so evenly up at the sun that they seem forever youthful, untouched by man or time.
Some are torn, ravaged, and convulsed like the features of profane old age. Rocks are wrenched up and exposed to view. Black pits receive the sun but give back no light.
On the verge where that prairie halted before a great wall of naked sandstone and clay I came upon a slit. A narrow crack worn by some descending torrent had begun secretly far back in the prairie grass and worked itself deeper and deeper into the fine sandstone.
[Narrator]
In the slit Eiseley found a skull gleaming in the dim light. It was for him the ultimate symbol of the vastness of geologic time.
[“Eiseley”]
The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I too were already caught a few feet above him in the strata. The creature had never lived to see a man; and I... what was it I was never going to see?
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