In any event, current physics wasn’t up to building a time machine, and wouldn’t be for at least another millennium. If ever.

Could someone have employed recombinant engineering to reassemble fragments of dinosaur DNA like in that movie he used to love back when he was a kid? Again, no. It was a pleasant fantasy. But DNA was fragile. It broke down too quickly. The most that had ever been recovered inside fossil amber had been tiny fragments of insect genes. That business of patching together the fragments? Ridiculous. It would be like trying to reconstruct Shakespeare’s plays from the ashes of a burnt folio, one that yielded only the words never and foul and the. Except that the ashes came not from a single folio, but from a hundred-thousand volume library that would have included Mickey Spillane and Dorothy Sayers, Horace Walpole and Jeane Dixon, the Congressional Record and the complete works of Stephen King.

It wasn’t going to happen.

One’s time could be better spent, alas, trying to restore the Venus de Milo by searching the beaches of the Mediterranean for the marble grains that had once been its arms.

Could it be a fake?

This was the least likely possibility of all. He had cut the animal apart himself, gotten its blood on his hands, felt the grain and give of its muscles. It had recently been a living creature.

In his work, Leyster followed the biological journals closely. He knew exactly what was possible and what was not. Build a pseudodinosaur? From scratch? Scientists were lucky if they could put together a virus. The simplest amoeba was worlds beyond them.

So that was that. There were only three possible explanations, and each one was more impossible than the next.

Griffin knew the answer, though! Griffin knew, and could tell, and had left behind his card. Where was it? It was somewhere on his desk.