Elegy for El Fósil

They call him El Fósil—the fossil—as if he were the only one at the museum. He’s not, but he sure is the showstopper, the reason tourists like me pedal bikes four kilometers uphill from Villa de Leyva’s plaza to spend an afternoon inside. I didn’t come to look at seashells in glass cases; I came to look at teeth.
The story goes that in 1977, a farmer was tilling his land when he uncovered a large stone, the length of his wingspan, and that stone had eye sockets and teeth. And with a little more excavating, he noticed other stones laid in place. A skeleton, or most of one. Ribs, tail bones. Funky little arms, with a slight curve—but no joint—where we humans might look for a wrist. Before he was called El Fósil he had lived as a Kronosaurus, a marine reptile of the Cretaceous Period measuring ten meters from snout to tail. The only fossil of its kind ever discovered in South America. One of a handful worldwide. I can imagine how he must have been talked about when he was first found: have you heard about El Fósil? have you been to see El Fósil? Eventually, the farmer sold the land—and the beast—to the government of Colombia, which built a museum in situ. A modest roadside thing. White walls. Vaulted ceiling with rafters painted black. Windows all around. Nothing fancy. A wooden railing went up around El Fósil himself. Yearning for the touch of bone, tourist hands like mine have settled instead for that banister. Over the years we’ve polished the stain away at the best photo spots, right by his head.
El Fósil was once a carnivore who used conical teeth longer than my fingers to gnash fish, to snap bone. Look at that alligator smile. It’s the kind that makes me want to pull my lips wide and stick out my jaw and grin a Cheshire grin. Look at that rock of a head. Is it just me or does it look disproportionately big for his round belly? Doesn’t he look like an alligator mixed with a turtle, but the size of a bus?
The color of El Fósil is hard to describe. I could say he’s the color of any old rock because that’s what he is now, right? Rock. Calcite. But he’s also, strangely, the color of the oldest things I own. Back at home, I have toy soldiers made of iron, three of them, plus a fourth, a drummer boy. My grandmother and her brothers played with the soldiers as children in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The paint has mostly chipped off and so one hundred years later, they are imperfect, pocked with remnants of color and rust, but mostly they are the gray of iron. El Fósil has his own gradations from red to gray. He’s missing his back left flipper.