Ivy and Bean Break the Fossil Record Read Free Page A

flew through the air. Soon, there was a nice, wide hole next to the trampoline. Ivy knelt beside it and ran her fingers through the dirt.

    “We have to inspect every bit of it,” Ivy said. “Even slivers of bone are important to paleontologists.”
    “What’s that?”
    “That’s us,” said Ivy. “The people who dig up dinosaurs are called paleontologists.”
    “Cool.” Bean felt cheerful. She loved the crunch of her shovel as it went into the earth. She loved hurling the dirt behind her without looking. Whee!
    “Hey, watch out! You got dirt in my hair!” cried Ivy.
    “We’re paleontologists! We can’t be afraid of a little dirt!” yelled Bean. The hole was almost 2 feet deep, and the dirt was getting darker and wetter. She flung a big hunk of it over her shoulder.
    “Ouch!” Something bounced off of Ivy’s head and landed next to her knee. She picked it up, brushing away the mud that was stuck to it. What was it?
    It was about as long as her hand.
    It was narrow at one end and flared out at the other.
    It was grayish brown.
    It was a bone.
    “Bean!” Ivy gasped. “Lookit! I got one.”
    Bean’s shovel crashed to the ground, and she rushed to Ivy’s side. Ivy handed her the gray brown bone. Bean stared at it and then gave a long whistle. “Watch your tail, Mary Anning!” she said. “Here we come.”

IVYBEANOSAUR
    They dug for half an hour without finding any more bones. Bean was on the edge of giving up. She figured that one bone was a lot more than most people found. But then she thought of Mary Anning chip, chip, chipping for a year. She didn’t want to be wimpier than Mary Anning. Or Ivy. So she dug and dug.
    Ivy’s nose was running, and she had mud all over her. Also, her feet had gone to sleep from being kneeled on. But she didn’t give up either. She combed through each new load of dirt with her fingers, feeling for bones. She found a lot of rocks. She found a marble. She found a piece of blue plastic.
    Then her fingers, burrowing into the mud like worms, plucked out another bone. This one was shorter and thicker, but it was definitely a bone. “I got another one!” she called. Bean dropped down beside her and looked at the gray brown lump.
    “We rock,” she said.
    “No. We fossil,” giggled Ivy. She dusted the bone carefully and put it next to the first one. “We can put them together later,” she said.
    “How do you put them together if you don’t know which dinosaur it is?” asked Bean.
    “It’s like a puzzle, I think. You look for pieces that fit together,” said Ivy. “We can look in dinosaur books, too, so it’s a lot easier for us than for Mary Anning. She didn’t have any pictures to look at. But,” she remembered, “Mary Anning found the whole ichthyosaur, so she didn’t need to put it together.”
    “It’s sort of cheating to find the whole thing,” said Bean. “Oh man! Here’s a big one!” She fished around in the dirt and pulled out a thick, heavy bone. It was a very serious-looking bone. Bean held it up. It reached from her hand to her elbow. She whistled. “This is no little, cute dinosaur. This is a big, scary dinosaur.”
    “What if that’s just its little finger?” said Ivy dreamily.
    “Monsterosaur!” said Bean.
    “IvyBeanosaur!” said Ivy. “You’re supposed to name them after the person who discovered them.”

    Bean giggled. Then her shovel hit something hard. Another bone appeared, this one smooth and rounded. “Whoa, Nellie!”cried Bean. “I think I got a piece of its skull!”
    A few minutes later, Bean found another small bone. Ivy found two more—one big, the other medium. There was no doubt about it: The backyard had been swarming with dinosaurs.
    “You know,” Ivy said, holding up her ninth bone. (They didn’t even call out when they found them now.) “Mary Anning was
twelve
when she found her ichthyosaur. We’re only seven. We’re probably the youngest paleontologists in the world.”
    Bean stopped digging and