Time Traveler
by Michael Novacek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
We all know that scientists can't really explain what it is they do, unless you happen to have a Ph.D. in their specialty. They are far above the rest of us. Science is so vast an enterprise that you must slog through foothills of background information before reaching the high peaks where the experts live and work. In Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Ancient Mammals from Montana to Mongolia, paleontologist Michael Novacek wisely tells us not just what he does, but what it's like to be him.
Novacek started out a Southern California boy in the 1950s and 60s, yearning for the wide open spaces. Like so many kids he was fascinated by fossils and dinosaurs, but put them aside as a teen. Playing in a rock'n'roll band while skimming through college to keep his student draft deferment, he was called back to his destiny in his junior year by an unexpected invitation. "Would you like to go in the field?" asked his professor, UCLA's Peter Vaughn, in early 1969.
That eye-opening summer Novacek traveled with Vaughn's team through the Colorado Plateau hunting Paleozoic fossils, and he recounts it all in lively, often humorous detail. There was another summer and another excursion to the same area. The more he learned, the harder he was hooked. "So this is what science is supposed to be. Not bad. It struck me that all that roaming around in wild places, those endless days of walking up beautiful canyons, those campfire dinners with sinewy conejo, those spectacular drives through red rocks, those tequila bars, those girls in the plaza at Truth or Consequences, were all part of a scientific adventure. And some people, like Vaughn, made a living at it."
In his senior year Novacek took a day job in the fossil tar pits of La Brea to help with the bills while he played music, but there he found the money was better and the filth was honest natural asphalt instead of backstage sleaze. Even as he pursued a master's degree at San Diego State University, his eye lingered on his musical prospects. But his greater talent began to shine forth as the tiny mammal fossils of the area seduced him. To make a fresh contribution, to push the frontier a little further, is the real reward of doing science. "For the first time in my life I felt intensely involved in a creative, intellectual journey, an exploration of a tiny sector of the fossil record and the tree of life where I had left others behind."
Paleontologists' field work is more than just chipping at rocks, and Novacek gives the dark side a visit too. Mechanical breakdowns, exhaustion, poisonous creatures and dumb bad luck are close companions in the remote regions he explores—Yemen, southern Chile, western Colorado, Mongolia. Perhaps still worse are some of the people, ranging from backwoods drunks to obstructive officials to roving gangs of soldiers. Worst of all, after skirting these many hazards the paleontologist may find the rocks are barren. More than once Novacek could have died, but he has lived to tell each tale, even the failures.
Today he holds a fossilist's dream job: Curator of Paleontology at New York's American Museum of Natural History. He reached this professional peak through talent, persistence and rare good luck. Those things don't make a book come alive. What does that in Time Traveler are some of Novacek's other important gifts—an empathetic regard for people and their cultures, the ability to see and seize opportunity, a passion for landscape and a great appetite for travel.
Not least is his ability to write well and communicate grateful excitement at the wonders he has seen in his 30-year career: the pristine land and exquisite Velociraptor fossils of Mongolia, stone villages of the Arabian desert, early Cenozoic mammal bones in the rugged Patagonian hills, even the ground-sloth knuckles he dug from La Brea's tar as a young man a stone's throw from his native Santa Monica.
Many different readers will enjoy Time Traveler. Fossil lovers in their mid-teens and up will absorb a great deal of basic Earth science while getting a feel for the profession as it's actually lived. Viewers of science TV and readers of Scientific American will find the life and heart behind the author's familiar face. Graduate students and fellow pros will relish the field stories as well as the carefully (a little too carefully) annotated citations that take them to the primary literature.
Time Traveler is well produced, almost totally free of typos and decorated with line drawings, location maps and the occasional photo. The rare factual errors—radioactive decay is said to involve ions rather than atoms, and the treatment of CAT scanning is thoroughly botched—are remote from the author's specialty. Take it as proof that a scientist doesn't have to know everything to be a success.
