He swept the worktable clear of its contents—books and floppies, a pair of calipers, paper cutter, bags of pretzels, snapshots from the dig—and set the head in its center.

Carefully he laid out the tools. Scalpel, forceps, saw. What happened to those calipers he’d had out here? He picked them up off the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, he tossed the mallet and chisel aside. They were for speedy work. It would be better to take his time.

Where to begin?

He began by making a single long incision along the top of the head, from the edge of the beak all the way back to the foramen magnum—the hole where the spinal cord leaves the braincase. Gently, then, he peeled away the skin, revealing dark red muscles, lightly sheened with silver.

Craniocaudal musculature, he wrote in the workbook, and swiftly sketched it in.

When the muscular structure was all recorded, he took up the scalpel again and cut through the muscles to the skull beneath. He picked up the bone saw. Then he put it down, and picked up the forceps. He felt like a vandal doing so—like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta. But, damn it, he already knew what a stego’s skull looked like.

He began cutting away the bone. It made a flat, crunching sound, like stiff plastic breaking.

The brain case opened up before him.

The stegosaur’s brain was a light orange-brown so delicately pale it was almost ivory, with a bright tracery of blood vessels across its surface. It was a small thing, of course—even for a dinosaur, a stegosaur was an extraordinarily stupid brute—and he was familiar with its shape from the close examination of brain casts taken from the fossil skulls of its kindred.

But this was scientific Terra Incognita. Nothing was known about the interior of a dinosaur’s brain, or its microstructure. Would he find its brain similar to those of birds and crocodiles or more like those of mammals? There was so much to learn here! He needed to chart and record the pneumatic structures in the skull cavity. And the tongue! How muscular was it? He should dissect an eye to see the number of types of color receptors it had.