Score one for scorpion that escaped sad fate

It's amazing how a critter's luck can turn in 15 months.

In the fall of 2004, a 2-inch scorpion living in southern Utah was unlucky enough to have crawled into a crack in the rock when paleontologists were jacketing a dinosaur bone in plaster. It remained hidden in the gap in the rock matrix as the bone was thoroughly sealed up for shipment.

Last September, the jacketed fossil was picked up by helicopter from the quarry in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and taken to the state fossil laboratory in Salt Lake City.

Fifteen months and several hundred miles to the north of where the scorpion was sealed in the protective jacket, it proved to be one of the most fortunate arachnids alive. The alive part is why it was so lucky.

When paleontologist Don DeBlieux recently cut into the plaster jacket, the scorpion moved.

"It kind of startled me at first," DeBlieux said in a Wednesday telephone interview. "It took me a second to realize it was a scorpion."

The crack in the matrix had been made by a large rock saw, added DeBlieux, who is a fossil preparator and a field supervisor on digs. "He had a fair amount of room in there to move around. . . .

"He must have been hunkering around in there."

The plaster and the crack may have provided enough insulation that the scorpion didn't get too hot or cold during the changing seasons. Perhaps it was in the arachnid version of hibernation.

A knee-jerk reaction by many people unexpectedly encountering a scorpion probably is to flee or kill it. That might seem especially true for paleontologists, who check their bedrolls when sleeping in the field to make sure no scorpions crawled in.

As a matter of fact, DeBlieux said, his boss — state paleontologist Jim Kirkland — was stung once by a scorpion.

But that's where the scorpion was doubly lucky. Once it was extracted alive, DeBlieux couldn't bring himself to harm the creature.

"I certainly didn't want to kill him after he'd lived that long," he said. Instead, DeBlieux maneuvered the survivor into a cup, photographed it and released it near a drainage canal.

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com