in the old auditorium like the singing of the sea:
“O Richard, Richard, thou numbskull
namesake
Of my late lamented colleague’s
single-minded son,
Thou hast shaken from our shaken family tree
Not only habilines but southern apes
Of both the robust and the gracile sorts.
And though an ape by any other name
Must needs make a monkey of
our nomenclature,
I here proclaim thee, chopfallen Richard,
By which I mean this skull and not thy brother
Leakey of the Koobi Fora lava beds,
Our foremost father in the man-ape line,
Preceding H. erectus on the upswing
To our sapient selves. Alas, poor Richard!
Habilis is deposed as well as dead!
In the long-lived, bony ruins of
this cold brainbox,
Long live the successor, Zarakali Man!”
Showmanship. Even though this pseudo-Shakespearean rant could not have made perfect sense to everyone there, it inspired intermittent laughter and finally a cascade of applause.
Blair kissed the skull on its brow, replaced it tenderly on the table from which he had first picked it up, and signaled for the dousing of the auditorium’s lights. He then narrated a colorful and comprehensive slide program interspersing panoramic shots of the Lake Kiboko digs with close-ups of recent fossil discoveries, the native wildlife, and many of his assistants at the site. He confessed that much of the work at even a fruitful paleoanthropological site was downright boring, and that he was not one of those people who actively enjoyed roaming the lava beds in temperatures of 102° F. In addition, he no longer had the patience for the painstaking work of cleaning a fossil discovery still perilously in situ. Younger hands were steadier than his.
Next—something Joshua had not expected—a series of slides devoted to the paintings of a prominent Zarakali artist’s fastidious reconstructions of Pleistocene animals. Despite the heat, Joshua began to shiver. It was strange realizing that this artist, working from bone fragments and imaginative taxidermal hunch, had attempted to objectify the persistent subject matter of his dreams. How accurately had she accomplished the task? Indeed, had she accomplished it at all? Joshua was the only one on hand, not excepting Alistair Patrick Blair, who would be able to tell.
“First slide, please.”
There jumped onto the screen a fanciful genus of sheep or buffalo called Pelorovis olduvaiensis. It had enormous curling horns that measured, according to Blair, ten feet from tip to tip. Joshua had read about this animal, but he had never encountered it during his recurring thalamic jaunts into the Pleistocene and so could reach no conclusion about the accuracy of its depiction. He felt lightheaded, though, as if he had surrendered the burden of those horns to the creature in the painting.
“Next slide.”
This one was Hippopotamus gorgops, with its projecting brow ridges and periscopic eyes. Joshua recognized it from his dreams, and the artist had expertly rendered the goggle-eyed strabismus typical of this hippo’s entire clan.
More slides followed. Giraffes with headgear reminiscent of the antlers of North American moose. Giant baboons, giant warthogs, giant hyenas. Primitive elephants known as Dinotherium, with abbreviated trunks and backward-curving tusks. If the paintings of these animals fell short of total accuracy—and sometimes they did—they usually failed by misrepresenting some aspect of the skin or fur: color, texture, markings, length. Wholly understandable errors. All in all, Joshua was astonished by the artist’s clairvoyance.
“Next slide.”
Several slope-backed animals with manes and horselike snouts appeared on the screen. The artist had made the manes dark brown and the bodies that luminous tawny color peculiar to African lions. The creatures all had moderately long necks, and Blair, after executing a hammy double-take, invited everyone to tell him what these unlikely quadrupeds actually were. “Giraffes!” some people shouted. “Antelopes!” others called. “A kind of horse!” a child’s voice cried.
Blair, dimly visible beside the screen, raised his hand. “Well, they are a variety of ungulate—that’s a vegetarian mammal with hooves—as are all the animals you’ve just named. But take a closer look at these hippogriffic camelopards. No one seems to have remarked their most distinctive and perhaps oddest feature.”
“Claws,” Joshua said to himself. Someone in the rear of the auditorium emphatically shouted the word.
“Right you are.” Blair stepped into the ray of the slide projector and tapped the feet of one of the animals rippling on the screen. “Very good. Of course, no one has yet put a name to our . . . our camelopardian hippogriffs. What’s the matter? Doesn’t anyone out there wish to rescue these poor fellows from anonymity, if not extinction? They must have a name, you know.”
Joshua said, “They’re chalicotheres.” He pronounced the word clearly and correctly, KAL-uh-koh-THERZ. A lovely word,