Valentia by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Followers of this blog will know how much I enjoy the work of Caitlin R. Kiernan. The other day I decided to read her collection To Charles Fort with Love. I have a number of her collections on hand. But I decided on this one because both my wife and I enjoy the reality styling of Charles Fort, the author of (among other titles) The Book of the Damned. Fort collected and published accounts of "anomalous phenomena," things like rains of frogs, mysterious disappearances, lights in the sky etc. Helen has subscribed to The Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to Fortean occurrences for years. Many science fiction writers have been fans of Fort and Eric Frank Russell based several novels on ideas gleaned for Fort's books. So I was not surprised that Kiernan would assemble a collection in his memory. 

Valentia is a relatively short work. The protagonist Dr. Anne Campbell is a paleontologist working in New York. She receives a call from her supervisor(?) that a colleague Morris Whitney has been found dead in Ireland his body recovered by fisherman. She also learns that the site he was working on, the trackway of a tetrapod(s) early four-limbed vertebrates, has been damaged. Once in Ireland, Campbell means Marie, one of the two graduate students working with Whitney. Marie asks if Campbell was Whitney's lover, but Campbell says that part of their relationship ended a long time ago. Marie can offer no insights into by Whitney would have visited the site at night, or how his death may have come about, or who  would damage the fossils. The motive was not theft since nothing appears to have been removed. Instead, the fossils were smashed to pieces until nothing remains. The photographs, measurements and the data gathered on the scientific tests that were performed are still available, and Campbell begins to study them. That night Campbell has a dream in which she is standing on the step of the American Museum of Natural History. Suddenly Campbell finds herself transported back into a Devonian landscape similar to the one that would have existed when the fossil trackway was created. This dream of past landscapes is one she has experienced before, but this time it seems more disturbing, and at one point, she seemed to hear Whitney's voice. 

I enjoyed this story. Helen and I worked as archaeologists, and I have had a lifelong interest in prehistoric life. Kiernan herself has worked as a paleontologist specializing in marine life; mosasours and turtles seem to be two areas of interest. This experience allows her to bring a level of expertise to the story, including the description of Campbell's dream landscape. At the end of the story, Kiernan's notes mention that parts of this story were reworked for her novel Threshold. She also mentions that the trackway is real and that it was discovered in 1994 by Ivan Stossel. 

If you are interested in this evolutionary period, I recommend Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. It was also a program on PBS. I took a look for the book downstairs, but I probably got it from the public library. I was able to find a theropod trackway photo, which might be the one Kiernan mentioned. Given our shared interests, Kiernan's story was one I found particularly interesting.