He opened the cooler.

For a long, still moment, he stared at what was contained within, packed in ice. Then, dazedly, he reached inside and removed it. The flesh was cool under his hands. The skin moved slightly; he could feel the bones and muscles underneath.

It was the head of a Stegosaurus.

A gust of wind made the window boom gently. A freshet of rain rattled on the glass. Cars hummed quietly by on the street below. Somebody in the hallway laughed.

Eventually, volition returned. He lifted the thing from the cooler and set it down on the workbench, atop a stack of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology reprints. It was roughly eighteen inches long, six inches high, and six inches wide. Slowly, he passed his hands over its surface.

The flesh was cool and yielding. He could feel the give of muscles underneath it, and the hardness of bone beneath them. One thumb slipped inadvertently onto the creature’s gums and felt the smoothness of teeth. The beak was like horn; it had a sharp edge. Almost in passing, he noted that it did have cheeks.

He peeled back an eyelid. Its eyes were golden.

Leyster found himself crying.

Without even bothering to wipe away the tears, not caring if he were crying or not, he flipped open a workbook, and began assembling tools. A number four scalpel with a number twenty blade. A heavy pair of Stille-Horsley bone-cutting forceps. A charriere saw. Some chisels and a heavy mallet. These were left over from last summer when Susan What’s-Her-Name, one of the interns from Johns Hopkins, had sat quietly in the corner week after week, working with a komodo dragon that had recently passed away at the National Zoo to prepare an atlas of its soft tissues. Exactly the kind of painstaking and necessary work one prays somebody else will perform.