In 1849, a crew building a railroad through Charlotte, Vermont, dug up
strange and beautiful bones in a farmer's field. A local naturalist
asked Louis Agassiz to help identify them, and the famous scientist
concluded that the bones belonged to a beluga whale. But how could a
whale's skeleton have been buried so far from the ocean? The
answer--that Lake Champlain had once been an arm of the sea--encouraged
radical new thinking about geological time scales and animal evolution.
Charlotte's Bones is a haunting, science-based reconstruction of
how Charlotte died 11,000 years ago in a tidal marsh, how the marsh
became a field, how Charlotte found a second life as the Vermont state
fossil, and what messages her bones whisper to us now about the
fragility of life and our changing Earth.