The Badlands
Petunia Paleo and the Giant Coprolite
Admiral Biscuit
It sat in the foyer of the Canterlot Paleontology Museum, on top of a smooth white plinth which would not detract from the magnitude of the specimen. Crystal lamps were discretely mounted in the ceiling, highlighting its lumpy smooth shape.
Around the edge of the room there were other fossils, small dioramas which illustrated an artist's representation of how the Paleopony era might have looked, and helpful informative placards which explained everything that was known or at least guessed at.
And it drew curious visitors into the museum, for on sunny days—of which Canterlot had many—the front doors of the museum were open, so any passers-by might see it, and hopefully come in. Typically, once they'd crossed the threshold, they were committed, and they'd pony up a few bits for the admission tickets, and then flock over to the display. And before they knew it, they were learning something, which was, after all, the purpose of the museum.
The cashier's eyes followed the latest family as they trotted in to look at the display. The children—a unicorn filly and an earth pony colt—dashed over eagerly, their parents not far behind. The stallion was tucking his bit purse back into his vest, while the mare was keeping a watchful eye on both her children while simultaneously studying the environment around her, a talent which the cashier, who had a foal of her own, knew well.
Invariably, after a brief examination, the foals would begin to guess at what it was. Sometimes they were right; usually they weren't.
The cashier turned her eyes out in the street, to watch for more potential patrons, but her ears were focused on the foyer, and after a good minute, the truth was revealed, followed by a moment of silence, and then an 'eeeeew' from the filly. But wasn't there just a little bit of morbid fascination behind that noise of disgust? The cashier thought so.
What followed next was invariably speculation about why the museum would have such a thing, but of course the signs explained it, and by the time they'd made their way around the edge of the room and studied the dioramas, they'd see the nose of a skeleton beckoning them from the next room, and move deeper into the bowels of the museum, until they finally reached the gift shop, conveniently located right next to the exit.
The Past
Petunia Paleo stood at the edge of the excavation and wiped a bit of sweat off her forehead. As much as she loved the sun, out here in the Badlands, it was a little bit too bright, and water just a little bit too scarce, and like any pony who had had the misfortune to find herself out in the hindquarters of nowhere, she wished that Celestia could maybe dim it down just a little bit.
But then she focused herself back on the task at hoof. The entire basin had turned out to be a veritable gold mine of fossils, and when she looked around at the parched, cracked earth, she saw a prehistoric swamp. Some weather cataclysm back in the distant past had turned what was once a fertile valley into a wasteland, but it had left plenty of evidence behind.
She made her way carefully down the rickety stairs that led to the base of the trench. They were cobbled together out of planks from packing crates, because that was the only wood that they had, and what had been intended as a shallow excavation had just gotten deeper and deeper as it yielded forth the secrets of the past.
The entire area was covered in a grid of twine, looking like some deranged earth pony's attempt at a garden, but Petunia knew it was vitally important to know exactly where each and every fossil piece had come from, so that they could put them together in the correct order, and by its depth they could estimate the age. And they were deep now, possibly moving into the realm of the unknown. Every discovery that she made here could shake the very foundations of Equestrian paleontology.
This was what she was born for.
She crouched in the depths of the pit, her tools a small trowel and a stiff brush, and scraped through another millennium-worth of dirt. Each small scoop of soil was dumped into a bucket, and later on it would be hoisted up out of the pit and run through a screen to make sure that no bone fragments had been missed.
• • •
It had taken her two weeks of careful excavation, but at last her prize was revealed to the Sun for the first time in millions of years. It was no secret what it was, of course; everypony on the team had gone to the edge and looked down at it and Petunia worked patiently to reveal it, like an artist revealing her masterpiece for the first time.
And she hadn't worked alone, either. A crew of laborers from Appleoosa—hardy stallions who were used to hard work in unfavorable conditions—had worked around the edges once she knew what she'd found. But even she hadn't expected it to be so big. Nopony had ever found a coprolite this size, nor did anypony back at the university have an idea what it might have come from. A dragon, perhaps, an elder wurm that ponies had never seen, that was a possibility. Or it could have been some as-yet undiscovered species of dinosaur, or perhaps even some ancient race of giant ponies.
That would be a mystery to solve later. Perhaps whatever left this behind was also preserved nearby.
As she worked, Petunia studied the stone surface intently, for there were small impressions of plant matter forever frozen in the coprolite, plants whose final end had perhaps been ignominious . . . or perhaps not, because here they were, millions of years later.
She dusted off her hooves, and made her way back up the shaky staircase, which—despite some emergency bracing—was slowly disintegrating. And she accepted the congratulations and the slaps on the back from all the other ponies on the team, and the mug of water which was pressed into her hooves in lieu of champagne.
She downed the water in one gulp, then held out the mug and it was refilled almost immediately from a waiting canteen, and then she turned and put her hooves up on the flimsy barricade keeping ponies from falling into the excavation and gazed upon her discovery. “That's the biggest turd Equestria has ever seen,” she said proudly.