In the spring of 2019, I joined a dinosaur excavation project in Liaoning Province, China. Led by influential paleontologists, the expedition’s goal was to find dinosaurs with feathers, transitional fossils essential to study the evolution from dinosaurs to birds. I walked on hills of rock fragments containing fossils and heard the sound of them breaking under my feet, like precious prehistoric potsherds. I realized a certain similarity but also an important difference between these fossils over 100 million years old and pottery made by the human species thousands of years ago. In the processes of fossilization, the organism’s tissues are filled or replaced with minerals, and what is left is the physical structure, like a ghost image. In the excavation field, living humans and the ghost images of dead organisms encounter across time in the same space.
        Unfortunately, our excavation was delayed again and again for various reasons. In the last ten days of waiting, I stayed at a ceramic factory nearby, went sightseeing, researched on dinosaurs, dined with government officials, drank fake wine, rode with intoxicated drivers, and made a series of ceramics with the distinctive pale-yellow and purplish-red clay extracted from the same mountains where dinosaur fossils are excavated. Fortunately, project to be continued.