Also whether this thing had nasal turbinates. Was there room enough for them? Their purpose was to trap and recover moisture from each exhaled breath. A warm-blooded animal, with its high rate of respiration, would need complex turbinates to help keep the lungs from drying out. A cold-blooded animal, needing less rehydration, might not have turbinates at all.

The argument over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded had been raging for decades before Leyster was even born. It was possible he could settle the whole matter here and now.

But first there was the brain. He felt like Columbus, staring at the long, dark horizontal line of a new continent. Here Be Dragons. His scalpel hesitated over the ruptured head.

It descended.

Weariness caused Leyster to stagger and briefly lose consciousness and recover himself all in an instant.

He shook his head, blankly wondering where he was and why he felt so tired. Then the room swam into focus and he felt the silence of the building around him. The Elvis clock an old girlfriend had given him, with its pink jacket and swiveling hips, said that it was 3:12 A.M. He’d been working on the brain without food or rest for over twelve hours.

There were several collection jars before him, each with a section of the brain preserved in formaldehyde. His workbook was almost filled with notes and drawings. He picked it up and glanced down at a page near the beginning:

Opening the cranial cavity reveals that the brain is short and deep with strong cerebral and pontine flexures and a steep caudodorsal edge. The small cerebral hemispheres have a transverse diameter slightly in excess of the medulla oblongata. Though the optic lobes and the olfactory lobe are quite large, the cerebellum is strikingly small.