FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The loud explosion jarred him awake and nearly out of his tent. He fumbled for his lenses, shouldered his khaki shirt, and furtively peered out his tent, his ears pricked for the slightest sound.

The hillside collapsed, the earth slumped inward and clouds of dust and debris filled the dawning sky. The lion in the khaki shirt yawned, shaking his blonde mane. How many months have I been out here, anyway? Not a single bone fragment worth taking back. Damn that other expedition and that other site, they have found everything we need...

He grunted, padding across the campsite to the newly formed crater. The earthmovers hauled tons of rock and debris away, several other paleontologists carefully surveying before signaling the drivers to keep digging at the sandstone walls.

He sat, disinterested, on a boulder being warmed by the sun. He opened his canteen and drank, squinting at the sunlight.

"No luck yet, but we've broken through the first few layers of strata. There's got to be more to find," a raven clapped his primaries on the lion's shoulder. The lion grimaced, pulling his whiskers back in disgust, and sighed.

"Doubtful," he shook his head. "We've been here for months. We'd be better off saving up for next year, packing up and heading home with our tails between our legs."

The raven chuckled, a hoarse clackityclack. "You're young. You can take more time!"

"More time? We have been here so long, my mane is grown past my legs!"

A red tailed hawk swooped in on the conversation, shuffling her feet and preening nervously. "Hey guys!" she chirruped, a mug of tea in her primaries.

"Oh, hey," the males grunted.

"No frags yet," she sighed. "I've combed through a ton of sites, and I've never had this bad of luck before!"

The lion pinched the bridge of his muzzle, growling. "I probably dragged in all the bad luck."

"Nonsense!" the raven warbled. "Eh, these things happen sometimes. It's the way our work goes--either we come back with specimens in our wildest dreams, or with a whole lot of--"

"Nothing!" howled a husky, his tongue hanging out. What he was doing so far from the cold of the north, stranded in a desert of all places, the lion would never know. "We keep coming up short, boss. We need to head home."

The husky, lion and hawk glanced at the raven, waiting for the response they wished for, to go home. Hot showers, soft beds, good food...

A spotted hyena ran in, her heavy boots and grinning maw interrupting that ray of hope.

"We found it! We found it!" she yelped.

"Found what?" the raven croaked, tilting his head at the huffing and puffing hyena.

"The whale...the last whale specimen of the Anthropocene!"

The lion, hawk and husky jumped up, their energy suddenly renewed. The raven chortled as he watched them follow the hyena to the paydirt.

An enormous baleen whale jaw jutted from the sandstone, entombed with bits of plastic and fishing net that was ubiquitous in the marine Anthropocene strata. It was nearly complete, and the team was enthusiastically digging away, careful to expose the bone one section of earth at a time.

"It's so weird and incredible, isn't it?!" the hyena panted. "Seeing our ancestors, rising from the dirt as they might have risen from the ocean depths..."

A pang of sadness struck the lion as he gently brushed sand and plastic pieces away from the bone. "It...its jaw...it's intact but...look..."

Everyone winced, realizing the creature's baleen plates were covered in the remnants of inedible plastics, fishing line, and the glint of microchip pieces.

"Plastic." The husky shook his head. "Man, that stuff...it's in almost every layer. It caused a huge extinction event, huh?"

"It's a contributing factor, yes," the raven nodded, inspecting the paleontologists' work as they went.

"Remember those albatross specimens we found a few years back? Those chicks were well preserved, their gut contents were nothing but broken plastics..." the hyena spat in the dirt, disgusted.

The hawk shivered, fluffing herself. "Ugh, don't remind me!"

"Sorry," the hyena shrugged, narrowing her eyes at the chunk of dentary she was clearing.

The lion felt conflicted as he continued to excavate. He wondered what other horrors the epoch held.

Eh, it can't be nearly as bad as the explosion this morning.