Reading multiple choice

The first thing Ines Carvalho does each morning in the field is look at the sky, and the second is look at the ground, because in the desert basin where she has spent the last nine summers, the two are intimately connected. When the wind has blown hard overnight, it strips away a thin skin of sand and exposes whatever lies beneath. Usually this is nothing. Occasionally it is a fragment of bone that has been waiting eighty million years for someone to notice it.

‘People imagine palaeontology as digging,’ she tells me, crouched beside a trench no deeper than a shoebox. ‘Mostly it’s walking, and looking, and being wrong.’ Her team of seven (three students, two technicians, a cook and a driver who doubles as a mechanic) covers up to twenty kilometres a day on foot, eyes fixed on the ground, in temperatures that by early afternoon make serious work impossible. They start at five, stop at noon, and spend the hottest hours under a canvas awning, cataloguing finds and arguing about football. By nine in the evening most of them are asleep.

The finds themselves are, to the untrained eye, deeply unimpressive. Carvalho shows me what she describes, with evident delight, as the best thing found so far this season: a brown, pitted lump the size of a matchbox. It is, she explains, part of the jaw of a small plant-eating dinosaur, and the angle of the tooth sockets suggests it may belong to a species not previously recorded in the region. ‘Or it may not,’ she adds immediately. ‘Ask me in three years.’ This caution is not modesty for its own sake. The history of her discipline is littered with new species announced on the strength of a single bone and quietly withdrawn a decade later, and she has no wish to add to the pile.

What strikes an outsider is how much of the work consists of not doing things. Bones that have survived for millions of years can crumble in minutes once exposed to air and handling, so anything significant is first photographed, mapped and wrapped in a jacket of plaster-soaked cloth before it is lifted. A large specimen can take a week to prepare for removal. On one occasion, a student who had found a promising leg bone was told to leave it in the ground for another season because there was no time to excavate it properly. ‘She wasn’t happy,’ Carvalho recalls. ‘I wasn’t happy. But a bone in the ground is safe. A bone in a hurry is not.’

The expedition’s funding depends on a patchwork of small grants, and Carvalho is frank about the pressures this creates. Funders like headlines, and headlines like large, fierce animals. Her own interest lies in the small creatures (lizards, early mammals, insects preserved in ancient mud) that reveal how whole ecosystems functioned, and that rarely make the news. ‘Everyone wants the dinosaur with the big teeth,’ she says. ‘But you can’t understand a predator without understanding what it ate, and what that ate.’ She has learned, she admits with a slightly guilty smile, to mention the larger animals prominently in her applications.

There are less obvious hazards, too. The nearest town is a two-day drive away, the radio works only from one particular hilltop, and a broken axle can end a season early. Water is rationed, and showers are a distant memory. Two summers ago, a sandstorm tore through the camp and buried a month’s worth of carefully labelled sample bags. They found most of them. ‘Most,’ Carvalho repeats, and changes the subject.

Why, then, does she keep coming back? She thinks about this for longer than I expect. ‘Because nowhere else am I so certain that what I’m doing matters, and so uncertain about what it means,’ she says eventually. Then she stands, brushes the sand off her knees, and walks off into the glare, scanning the ground as she goes.