Elephant Bones

It was a dark and stormy night when Rep got the call.  An elephant had died at the San Francisco Zoo.  Could he come investigate?  Recent investigations into the death, by shark attack, of a 13 million year old paleoparadoxia (now renamed paleoparadoxia repenningi) had left him unsatisfied regarding the bone structure of the feet of these large mammals, so the elephant case intrigued him.  Sure.  He'd come.

As he drove north through the night in the kind of rain you only get on the sunny California coast, his headlights, wipers and brain were racing.  Would he find the answers he was looking for?  Or just more questions?

The keeper who met him seemed nervous.  The recently deceased elephant's mate had a bullet proof alibi.  He had been in the pen at the time of death.  But now the bull seemed intent on breaking out.  As they walked toward the scene, they could hear him crashing against the bamboo fence that separated him from his deceased mate and bellowing over the sounds rain, wind and surf.

The electricity was out.  They had to drive the station wagon into the pen and turn the head lights on the body.  As the bull continued to attack the bamboo fence, Rep turned to ask the keeper about tools for the autopsy.  He was met by a blank, frightened look.  He had no tools.    Fortunately, Rep had a few carpentry tools in the back of his "Woody" station wagon.  He began his work.  The bull became more determined.

Rep asked the keeper if the fence would hold.  The keeper replied that he thought it would,  but perhaps it would be best if they hurried.  He provided Rep with some large plastic bags for the "evidence" and together they loaded two of the feet into the back of the Woody. Then he began his long drive home.

Rep had met the zookeeper while he was a grad student at the University of California, Berkeley.  He was frequently the first to hear about strange deaths at the zoo and often given the chance to take all or parts of the deceased for his research.  In the beginning, he borrowed the weber grills from all the houses on the block and cheerfully cooked the meat off the bones.  Eventually he acquired a huge cauldron (big enough to cook a missionary) and set it up behind a bamboo fence in the far reaches of his back yard.  He decorated the fence with scary African Masks to keep neighborhood children out.  

The elephant's feet were his biggest specimen yet and too big to fit comfortably in the cauldron.  He left them in the plastic bags in the garage for a few days trying to come up with a sensible solution.  He didn't find one.  

Here's where I come in.  As his oldest child, I found the elephant feet in the garage completely fascinating.  A lot more interesting than the pet tarantula and the various snakes, not nearly as interesting as my best friend the raven, about the same as the pet skunk, bobcat and geese.  The other neighborhood kids and I snuck into the garage whenever we could to marvel at the ghastly sight.

I think that's what gave him the idea.  He bought a bunch of shovels and told us to "find China".  We cheerfully

excavated in the back yard for several days.  We had quite a good hole dug by the time Barbara Burkemper fell in and broke her arm.  At this point, the shovels were confiscated.  

Then the elephant feet were buried and almost forgotten for several years.  

But I was famous for being the only girl at my high school who had an elephant buried in the back yard.  

Today the one remaining foot of that elephant is in the Paleontology lab of Professor Chris Bell at the University of Texas at Austin where it continues to fascinate people.  

Veteran's Day, 2010

My father, Charles A Repenning - World Famous Paleontologist and WWII Hero - (at least according to the Denver Post) requested in his will that he be cremated and suggested that his ashes be either thrown off the California Coast to sift down among his beloved Elephant Seals or encased in plastic key chains and sold as souvenirs at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting.  He suggested that this latter method was probably the only way we, his offspring, were going to make any money off his demise.

Knowing how opinionated, controversial and downright cranky the old guy was, I have my doubts as to how much money his remains would net us even if the key chains were gold plated.

The former idea, however, has a lot of merit.  The elephant seals that come ashore on California's beaches are extremely crabby beasts.  Off shore there is a party going on that is the elephant seal version of Spring Break on Florida beaches.  The guys who come ashore are the ones who can't find a partner in the mating game.  Dumping his mortal remains out among a bunch of sex-starved, grumpy males just seems so right. They were kindred spirits, so to speak.  I could add details, but won't.

However, 5 1/2 years after his murder, his ashes are still in my Chicago garage.  I haven't been able to arrange or afford a trip to California to dump him.

This morning we woke to discover that Veteran's Day was going to be beautiful.  Warm, sunny and fall colors everywhere.  It just doesn't get better.  And Charley wanted to get out into nature, but had an errand to do in Oak Park.  I suddenly remembered that the park where my Dad spent his childhood was a couple blocks from the place Charley had to go.  Somehow it just seemed TIME.  So while Charley did his thing, Sam and I walked over to the park.  I've been there a couple of times in the last 5 years, thinking about Dad.  This park has a few animals in cages: a red fox, a coyote, some birds of prey.  It had the same animals, apparently, 70+ years ago when my Dad was riding his bike to this park.  This is where he learned to love nature and rocks.  He and his best friend spent every spare moment in this place getting really dirty and I think it is still pretty much like it was then.  Sam and I walked around a bit and then we found a pretty remote place beside a fallen tree.

I opened the urn I had purchased for Dad and poured out his ashes.  The urn is made of a single piece of agate.  I figured, while waiting to get thrown off a cliff, he'd be happier encased in a rock like that than in the plastic box the funeral home put him in.  I had forgotten, but I also had put in a fossil mouse jaw and some of his dog's hair.  I poked those in among his ashes.  We sat there in the sunshine a little bit and thought about Dad as a little boy - full of wonder and curiosity.  Dad had come a full circle back to innocence, back to the place where he was happy before the war, before disillusionment and disappointment and bitterness.  Instead of letting him drift among rejected suitors, I laid him to rest in a place of possibility and wonder and I gave him fossils and dog hair.  He's with the places and things he loved most in the world.

 And I felt more peaceful than I have felt in 5 1/2 years.

Rest in peace, you old goat.  I love you.

Amazing and Apparently True Repenning Stories

OK I promised to record some of my childhood stories.  Here is the first one.  Remember the Repenning Family Motto: "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."  I think this is mostly true...


Whenever I am at one of those parties where they ask you to tell something about yourself that no one knows I say that, oddly enough, I was the ONLY girl in my high school who had an elephant buried in my back yard.  In all the years of saying this, I have only ever met one other person who had an elephant buried in their backyard.  They were from South Africa someplace.  I'm from a suburb of San Francisco.  Elephants buried in back yards was unusual in Mountain View.  Now that it's called "Silicon Valley" I assume it is even more unusual.

My dad was a paleontologist, zoologist and geologist.  When an animal died in the San Francisco Zoo they would give him first dibs.  He would often bring them home and display them on the front lawn for a day or two.  My husband remembers vividly our first date when he arrived to pick me up and there was a ram's head bleeding on the front walk.  He got the message and was VERY careful to get me home on time.  Another time Dad brought home two zebras and propped them up under the plum tree on the front lawn.  It looked very much like an African Savannah.  My mother says a police car drove by very slowly several times.  Mountain View had very strict pet codes, but nothing about dead zebras on the front lawn, I guess.

But back to the elephant.  This was back in the days when Stanford was building the Stanford Linear Accelerator.  This is a mile long underground tube.  Scientists stick an atom up on a dart board at one end of the tube and then aim an electron at it from the other end a mile away.  Obviously, it has to be pretty accurate.  The guy digging the hole, however, made a 100 meter error and cut off the head of some prehistoric beast.  Fortunately they discovered the error and went back to digging the tube and left the headless beast for my dad to identify and name.  He named it the Paleoparadoxia and I spent a lot of my junior high years crawling around in it's ribcage while he and Adele Panofsky excavated it.  

At the time they found this beast, my dad was engaged in the  study of shrews - a  VERY tiny rodent.  He kept some shrews in his bedroom in an aquarium.  They die of fright if you startle them, so we were forbidden to go into my parent's bedroom.  He wanted to develop a bio-chronology of these tiny rodents that would be similar to "Petersen's Field Guides."  Paleontologists could carry his field guide around in their back pockets and get a pretty accurate date for any fossil beds they might find.  It's the teeth that are important.  Remember that in case I write another chapter.

But back to the elephant.  With great reluctance, my father was convinced to put aside his microtene rodents and turn to this gargantuan thing-a-ma-bob and it's modern relatives.  This was how he became an expert in elephant seals and demostylians.  It was at this juncture an elephant died at the San Francisco Zoo.  He was really only interested in the feet, so he drove up there to collect them.  The zookeeper just pointed him to the pen and left him.

It was a dark and stormy night.  He pointed the headlights of his woody station wagon at the elephant and got out his tool kit.  As the storm raged around him, he managed to saw off the parts he needed and put them in great big garbage bags and stuffed them into the back of the woody.  Can't you just see the movie footage?  Lightning flashes and winds howl as our mad scientist waves his saw defiantly at the sky while the elephant's mate on the other side of a flimsy bamboo fence trumpets in a mad rage.  It doesn't actually thunder and lightning in San Francisco, but I always see lightning when I picture this.


Now in normal circumstances, after amusing himself and the neighbors, animals from the zoo were taken to the "bone yard".  This was a fenced off portion of our back yard presided over, appropriately enough, by our raven, Honker and decorated with fierce witch doctor masks.  In the bone yard were several barbeques and a large cauldron.  Really large.  I mean big enough to boil a missionary.  Here was where he would render the animal down to bare bones to study.  Unfortunately, he discovered that elephants are so big that even the feet will not fit in a large cauldron.


So my ever resourceful father went to the local hardware store, bought several shovels and gathered all the kids in the neighborhood.  "Find China" he said and we began.  We dug and dug and dug.  We made roads down into the hole.  We had a perfectly wonderful time until Barbara fell down and broke her arm.  That was the point where he figured we had dug far enough.  He unwrapped the elephant feet and dropped them in the hole.  And left them there for several years until they were clean.


And that, O Best Beloved, is how I came to have an elephant buried in my back yard.






 

Paleontologist

So here are the top ten things I learned as the daughter of a Paleontologist:
10 - Never go into your parent's room without permission. You might kill a shrew.
9 - It is ok to get dirty and dig up the backyard as long as you actually find something
8 - Always check your shoes for scorpions before you put them on.
7 - Dinosaurs are boring. The really good stuff came later.
6 - When people ask you the difference between paleontology and archeology the easiest way to explain it is Jurassic Park - Paleontology, Indiana Jones - Archeology
5 - Your teachers will tell you all kinds of interesting facts about bugs except the most important thing which is - Ants horde mouse jaws
4 - Never ask your dad to help you with your science fair project. Not only will the result be something you don't understand and can't explain but it will also be something the science teacher can't understand. Teachers don't like that.
3 - Tarantulas can't kill you. Those movies are not made by zoologists.
2 - The correct name is Microtine Rodents and don't let anyone tell you different.
1 - Always keep your hands and feet where you can see them. If you forget, don't blame the rattlesnake when it bites you.