Perfect.
I swung a leg over the edge and began to descend. Hot dry air rose beneath me, and my heart raced at the secrets I was about to uncover.
Three rungs down, I paused at the smaller skull, and my breath hitched. It had teeth. Oh my God. This is amazing. Adjusting my grip on the ladder, I snapped a dozen photos. I couldn't yet tell whether the remains belonged to a baby dinosaur or a smaller species altogether, but what I could tell was that most of the skeleton was intact, if not all of it.
Holy shit. I was right about this site. And this was my dig site.
No, not just my dig site. This discovery could rewrite the history books.
And Doug Walker could go screw himself if he thought he was taking credit for it. Especially if this skull turned out to be a dinosaur that had never been found in this region before.
I scanned the bones scattered below, and with every photo I took, my heart thumped harder. The base looked solid enough and dry, but faint sediment trails suggested water still flowed through the pit from time to time.
I shoved my ponytail over my shoulder, hooked the camera strap around my neck and climbed deeper. The ladder creaked beneath me, and the edges above crumbled as the ladder ropes shifted across the dirt, showering sediment onto my hat.
About halfway down, I found a tiny skull near the curve of a buried femur.
I leaned closer. That wasn't a dinosaur bone. It was a rodent skull.
Beside it lay a ribcage no bigger than my hand, perfectly arched like a fallen leaf. A rabbit, maybe? Or a bandicoot?
Further to the left, a long snake skeleton lay coiled between two layers of silt.
Wow.
There were thousands of bones down here. Some were so old they were fossilized into stone. Tiny claws. Hollow bird bones. Jawbones the size of grapes.
This wasn't just a prehistoric site frozen in time.
It was still catching victims.
A living trap that had claimed the desperate, the unlucky, the predator, and the prey for thousands of years. Maybe millions.
Halfway down, I stopped again. Nestled in a shallow depression lay another massive skull with teeth as big as daggers. There was a split in the cranium above the eye socket, and the rib cage splayed outward from the base of the skull in a fan of bone.
The quality of the find stole the breath from my lungs. These bones had been protected from the elements. The skeletons would be perfectly preserved and could go straight into a museum. I imagined my name printed on each card detailing the species and how I had discovered them. Dr. Charlie Macintyre. Not "Junior Researcher to Professor Doug Walker." Not "that girl from Brisbane who claimed Dr. Marcus Webb had stolen her discovery. Just my name. My work. My research. In the history books forever.
My skin tingled at how good that sounded. Everyone who had tried to turn me against my career choice would regret their unwanted opinions. Well, not everyone. My older sisters never said sorry about anything. And Mom would finally have to admit that my career choice was way better than being a wife and a mom, like she tried to force onto me with every single phone call.
This was my shot. One big find. That's all I'd needed. One big, career-defining, impossible-to-ignore discovery.
And I'd found it.
I reached for the camera again, and with my heart pounding, took over a dozen photos of the giant skull.
This skull belonged in a museum and the textbooks.
And if Doug tried to claim ownership of this discovery, I'd bury him in the sediment next to it.
Not really.
Possibly.
Grinning like a crazy woman, I aimed the camera down into the pit and snapped photos of what could be the biggest discovery the University of Queensland had had in decades, if ever.
After hooking the camera strap around my neck, I continued down the ladder.
The bottom was nearly twenty feet down, deeper than I'd realized. I frowned at the way the wall sloped outward near the base, shaping it similarly to a giant Bunsen burner bottle. Maybe water had once swirled around the lower section like a whirlpool, carving away the soft soil. Erosion halfway down looked fresh, too. Could be from last summer's floods. Yet the massive skull near the top remained intact.