"Where'd you come from?" Gtiitierrez asked him.

"Mongolia," Levine said. "I was at the Flaming Cliffs, in the Gobi Desert, three hours out of Ulan Bator."

"Oh? What's there?"

"John Roxton's got a dig. He found an incomplete skeleton he thought might be a new species of Velociraptor, and wanted me to have a look."

"And?"

Levine shrugged. "Roxton never really did know anatomy, He's an enthusiastic fund-raiser, but if he actually uncovers something, he's incompetent to proceed."

"You told him that?"

"Why not? It's the truth."

"And the skeleton?"

"The skeleton wasn't a raptor at all," Levine said. "Metatarsals all wrong, pubis too ventral, ischium lacking a proper obturator, and the long bones much too light. As for the skull…" He rolled his eyes. "The palatal's too thick, antorbital fenestrae too rostra], distal carida too small - oh, it goes on and on. And the trenchant ungual's hardly present. So there we are. I don't know what Roxton could have been thinking. I suspect he actually has a subspecies of Stenonychosaurus, though I haven't decided for sure."

"Stenonychosaurus?" Guitierrez said.

"Small Triassic carnivore - two meters from pes to acetabtiltim. In point of fact, a rather ordinary theropod. And Roxton's find wasn't a particularly interesting example. Although there was one curious detail. The material included an integtimental artifact - an imprint of the dinosaur's skin. That in itself is not rare. There are perhaps a dozen good skin impressions obtained so far, mostly among the Hadrosauridae. But nothing like this. Because it was clear to me that this animal's skin had some very unusual characteristics not previously suspected in dinosaurs - "