Final entry in the field journal of UMD paleontologist Franklin Hall Moore, Sept. 1, 1984

The last duckbilled dinosaur in Duluth, down and out on the sand beach in the tropical climate of the late Cretaceous, feels drunk from the fermented newly-evolved berries of a now-extinct genus. Minnesota is closer to the equator, the constellations strange. He chases the scent of increasingly rare juicy ferns along the beach toward prehistoric Wisconsin.

The duckbill whips his tail against the harassing blue-feathered velociraptors trying to run him down like a pack of dogs. He’s ten feet tall at the hip but they see he’s got a small limp from a wound that won’t heal on his right foreleg. They also see the sore tumor on his tiger-striped orange back. So they’d separated him from his herd — over the hill in what will evolve into the mallscape of Hermantown — and chased him to this strip of sand, the border between a retreating lagoon and the forested rift valley that will become Lake Superior.

Sixty-six million years later in the trashed and spent postindustrial Duluth, I’m a down and out paleontologist, my tenuous professorship finally axed as the city starts to dry up and blow away in recession and contraction. So much of the populace drained out, someone put up a billboard on the way to the cities: “Will the last one leaving Duluth please turn out the light.”

A time ripe for destruction, doom courting from every angle. I walked the length of the junkyard that is Canal Park, rows of piled dead cars at the water’s edge like an alluvial bone deposit, you might think they all died there at once in a singular catastrophe. The concrete ruin out in the water, “Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum,” was a functional unloading dock for four years, and 62 years later we’re still looking at it, a cracked fossil far outlasting the random life it immortalizes.

Canal Park is not just a junkyard. I had a few Duluth Fireships — a cocktail invented an eon ago in 1673 — at a dive bar called “The Unsalted Seadog” catering to ancient mariners. Bought a bottle of whiskey at a liquor store called “Liquor Store.” Then I crossed the lift bridge, got to the beach. I walked all the way to the nature trail at the end, favoring the trim sand of the bay side.

He lost the raptors but also lost his family. No one responded to the honking calls amplifying through his hollow head crest like a trombone. It only brought the raptors again, emboldened. But a kick from a rear three-toed hoof of the 30-foot-long, five-ton duckbill connects, a direct hit from what amounts to a colossal drumstick of hard muscle. In an explosion of iridescent feathers, the raptor sails broken through the air, splashes into the lagoon and does not re-emerge. The other raptors stop, tilt their heads, and look at each other making uncertain vocalizations.

Here in the Cretaceous, instead of the harbor and the St. Louis River, there is a marshy lagoon that stretches west for miles. It is an appendage of the Western Interior Seaway, which covers half the state and bisects the continent, submerging the flyover states under 3,000 feet of saltwater. But Duluth is high and dry. Lake Superior, unformed, remains a great fertile valley of redwood-sized conifers, alive with animal calls, within sight of the lagoon’s edge and the seaway beyond. The duckbill stumbles over an ammonite shell in the sand, a reminder that sea creatures stray into the lagoon’s shadows.

I’m too much like what I imagine, the last day of Duluth’s last duckbill, a hadrosaur on the way out even before the asteroid. I’ve got a fossilized duckbill vertebra sticking out the side pocket of my herringbone blazer — swiped it from the University collection. Its provenance is uncertain anyway. Supposedly it turned up after a flood and was brought in by a helpful citizen, but we’re still trying to determine exactly where it was found — well, we were trying to determine that until my grant got unceremoniously yanked at the end of the school year. Maybe the fossil emerged from a mine pit. “Think of it Jenkins, it’s not in situ and we don’t even know how deep it was or what processes could have brought it up. We haven’t dug deep enough in the folded strata to find the true monsters we’re looking for. Someday we’ll reach a Minnesota T-Rex.”

My creditors want money I haven’t got and so does my divorce. In my other side pocket is a foreclosure notice from the bank, heavier than the fossil. This is an extinction-level event. So maybe I can hock this back bone for some scratch. The University won’t even notice it’s missing until they excavate their own collection; they don’t know what they have, much less what they don’t have.

Sixty-six million years ago, this duckbill might have walked just where I’m walking now. The geography was different — everything was a number of meters higher — glaciers hadn’t formed yet to scrape the topsoil off down to the bedrock. But I’m as close to this duckbill now as it’s possible to be for two creatures separated by the gulf of time. We both see the writing on the wall.

Minnesota paleontology through history: Winchell in the 1880s articulated the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, also helped build the state. Then Stauffer in the 1920s and his student Berquist in the 1940s, Sloan in the ’60s. And now Cobban and Merriweather in the ’80s — and me. I am the wind beneath their wings but the environment’s changed, the ground eroding. I’ve washed out like a glacial moraine.

Walking the forested sandy edge of the lagoon, the raptors are still working up their nerve so I take a moment to eat some wood-burrowing crustaceans out of a driftwood log — beach food. I bite into the log where the bivalves have dug in, little bit of wood never killed anyone, crunchy calcium shells around briny protein. That fills one stomach, I got another one on empty, keep foraging. In the future they’ll call me a strict vegetarian but I don’t care.

In 1965 the fossilized inner ear bones of an extinct catfish were described as “phenomenally large” in the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. The phenomenal catfish are spawning in the estuarine lagoon where they will then die in mass. Only their oversized ear bones will fossilize, piles of these otoliths fascinating and terrifying the paleontologists of the far future, of which I am one. Actually the Minnesota ones will be eroded away like so many layers of our dramatic geological record. Maybe one of those catfish ate that raptor I kicked into the deep end. Serves him right.

I lay around drunk on the beach, a disgrace as families with kids walk around and step over me. A plesiosaur — an anaconda with the body of a leopard seal — charges halfway up onto the sand and snatches a velociraptor in its curved teeth, pulls it under. The other raptors definitively lose interest in me. I see the bloated corpse of an ankylosaurus out there. Finally, some peace and quiet.

Pterosaurs swoop over the water, skim-feeding fish to eat them in the sky. Sleeping on the wing, some land once a year for the mating ritual. Older ones skip landing altogether, remain aloft year after year, circling the globe until the end.

The nine-mile-wide asteroid hits 2000 miles to the south and I wasn’t doing so well to begin with. Survive the blast wave circling the planet. Pteranodons fall from the outraged sky. I am killed by a rain of flaming rock advancing like a creeping barrage. Guess I better go back to Iowa, try to move in with Mom, like crawling back into a broken eggshell. Sometimes our problems are bigger than us. Will the last duckbilled dinosaur in Duluth please turn out the light?

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.