It is a dark night on a lonely highway outside Santa Fe, N.M. In the distance on either side of the road, you can still see the looming outlines of stately mesas.
“That’s all sedimentary rock up there. If you need to urinate, I’m happy to pull over,” Matt Lewin says as I glance out the window. “Some of the greatest fossil discoveries on Earth have been made from taking a piss.”
Lewin is not being sarcastic. For him, a drive down a New Mexico highway is something between taking a trip to Disneyland and being subjected to Chinese water torture. Miles upon miles of potential finds lie in wait, but each mile marker represents another lost opportunity. A few times he can’t contain himself, and we pull over to look at deposits by the highway.
“I’m not a snob,” he says at one point during the trip, examining an ordinary piece of petrified wood that most fossil hunters would probably ignore. “Something that lasted 35 million years or 100 million years, and it’s as beautiful as the day it was laid down.”
