I live not far from the La Brea Tar Pits, so I watched with interest a Nova program on the discovery of an intact Thylacoleo carnifex skeleton: a giant prehistoric Australian marsupial lion. Although I empathized with the palaeontologists' joy and their anxieties about poachers/looters, the documentary made me glad of several things about my profession:

• I do not have to live with my colleagues for weeks at a time.
• Although I would camp in the harshest of conditions to recover an equivalent discovery in my field, I am glad most of my working materials are in comfortable museums and libraries in large metropolitan centers where one can get good tea (or espresso).
• I do not have to rappel into hazardous caves or inch into tiny crevices: I'm not claustrophobic or scared of heights, but the chances of my ever having to do either for work is, in fact, far less than an Australian palaeontologist's.
• I may do desert archaeology, but odds are I won't be thousands of kilometers from any species of human habitation.

I feel a great deal of kinship with my colleagues in the sciences: I, too, have to reconstruct what I study, assign dates to them, ask specialists to test them, preserve them, handle them in a specialized manner with unique materials; I see things in them an untrained eye would miss, and I understand each new find by working from a databank of similar, prior finds. I know what it is like to suddenly have something unique and old that tells us something about the past we never knew before. I congratulate them on the Thylacoleo find (although it must be old news to them if I'm just now watching the documentary), and raise a cup of tea to our professional kinships.

-Kushana
P.S.  Giant Peruvian Penguins!