Robert Proctor, history of science professor, is a specimen connoisseur. Ancient fossils. Minerals spewed from volcanic plugs. Petrified wood from a dinosaur's digestive tract. He hunts them in secret Pacific coves, in far-flung forests and in overseas mines. He displays some of his finds in a sprawling garden assemblage. And sometimes he lovingly amends them, skillfully using sandpaper, for instance, to polish cross-sections of resin-filled pine tree joints to a fragrant, cabinetry-smooth finish.
"Rockhound" is a description that captures Proctor's exploratory zeal, but it utterly fails to convey the scope of his curiosity and acquisitions. Where others have lawn, he has fossilized shells from an extinct clam species and pieces of whale vertebrae, distinguishable from rocks because his close vision detects a distinct cell structure. He smiles at the notion that he has a "voodoo garden."
His collecting may seem a bit—forgive the pun—scattered. But his eclectic quest has an Indiana Jones quality: He has a shark's tooth from a South Carolina mud flat where he fell into a cavity that offered barely enough footing for an escape. He was tempted to bolt for Russia after the recent meteorite strike there, thinking he might use bloodhounds to locate fragments.
Among his trove are Acheulean hand axes, stone objects that possibly were tools for pre-human species. Those have avoided the garden, resting on a shelf along with a curlicued remnant of solidified 75-million-year-old alligator dung.
