Rattle His Bones by Carola Dunn

who “did” for Daisy and Lucy and took a deep, admiring interest in their work, had already gone home. Daisy rang through to Lucy on the studio extension, but there was no answer.
    Three weeks—she had better get cracking. She telephoned the Natural History Museum and made appointments to see the Keepers of Zoology and Botany in the morning.
    That done, she dropped her hat on the table, her coat on the chair, and leaving luggage strewn about the hall, hurried to the tiny back parlour which was her study. She already had a rough draft of the stately home article, typed on the portable machine on semi-permanent loan from her Town and Country editor (How her mother had moaned at the evidence of her daughter’s occupation!). It wouldn’t take long to finish it up on the massive, ancient Underwood typewriter which sat incongruously on the elegant Regency writing table from Fairacres.
    The Underwood saw a great deal of her that week. Each day she returned from the museum with reams of notes and
typed long into the evening. The museum’s business was far more complicated than she had realized.
    In the private offices, studies, and work rooms where she was now introduced, the preparation of specimens for display was a minor aspect of the work in progress. From all over the world, unknown plants and creatures were sent to be classified. Daisy had never previously heard of Linnaeus, but she was soon as familiar with his system as with the map of the London underground. The museum staff produced not only minute descriptions but painstaking drawings and even paintings of each specimen.
    That was in the Zoology and Botany Departments, where specimens normally arrived with all their parts intact. In the Geology Department, imagination played a greater part. As Mummery had explained to her, few fossils were found complete; the missing bits had to be guessed at. At least, it looked like guesswork to Daisy, though Mummery insisted it was educated deduction.
    His position was undermined by the iconoclastic Ruddlestone, Curator of Fossil Invertebrates, a jolly North-countryman who rivalled Alec’s sergeant, Tom Tring, in size and baldness.
    â€œGuesswork is more like it, though we have advanced a bit since Waterhouse Hawkins,” Ruddlestone admitted to Daisy.
    â€œWaterhouse Hawkins?”
    â€œHe built life-size concrete dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, all as bulky and firmly four-footed as elephants or hippos. Believe it or not, he gave a dinner party inside one half-completed model. Then there were the Americans, Cope and Marsh: bitter enemies, brilliant in many ways, but Cope stuck the skull of an Elasmosaurus on
the end of its tail! Marsh never let him forget it.” Ruddlestone roared with laughter.
    â€œMr. Steadman told me his Diplodocus has the wrong feet.”
    â€œPoor Steadman, it rankles badly that his prize exhibit is made of plaster of Paris. A load of real bones the Americans sent over during the War was sunk by a German submarine. A great loss, whatever that ass Pettigrew said.” The curator was no longer amused.
    â€œWhat did he say?” Daisy asked, though she had a good idea.
    â€œThat the loss of mere fossils was trivial. In his view, a cargo of munitions would have been a great loss. But munitions can be replaced and fossils cannot! I’m afraid affairs like the controversy over Dr. Smith Woodward’s Piltdown skull play into the hands of ignoramuses like Pettigrew.” Ruddlestone cheered up. “But it illustrates what I was telling you: They can’t all be right, so someone’s ‘educated deductions’ have to have gone far astray!”
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    Later that afternoon, shortly before the museum closed, Daisy asked Smith Woodward about the Piltdown Man controversy.
    He took her to see it again, but this time he contemplated it in silence for a minute, before sighing, “It really is very troublesome. Fossil fish are really