I will correct [Marsh’s] errors, and I expect the same treatment. This should not excite any personal feelings in any person normally or properly constituted; which unfortunately Marsh is not. He makes so many errors, and is so deficient that he will always be liable to excitement and tribulation. I suspect a Hospital will yet receive him. *Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist (1840-1897)

Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby ran in front of a car right outside my townhouse. Killed instantly.

Fred loved that cat, and his wife knew he’d be upset when she told him what had happened. But when he got back Sunday evening, he said he already knew the cat was dead — because, according to the version of the story I eventually heard over my back fence, he’d seen his cat up at the cottage, two hundred kilometers away. The tabby had appeared to him one last time to say good-bye.

I always looked at Fred a little differently after I’d heard that. I mean, it was fantastic, and fantastic things don’t happen in normal lives. Certainly they don’t happen to people like me.

Or so I thought.

I’m a paleontologist; a dinosaur guy. Some might think that’s glamorous, I suppose, but it sure doesn’t pay glamorously. Oh, about twice a year, I get my name in the paper or five seconds on CBC Newsworld, commenting on a new exhibition or some new find. But that’s about it for excitement. Or at least it was, until I got involved in this project.