A.J. shrugged. "Like I said, don't ask me what they are. But I can extract one for you, no problem."

He glanced into his VRD, mumbled some barely audible words, tapped out orders on an imaginary keyboard, and suddenly one of the "plates" glowed and seemed to spiral up and expand, filling a secondary window at the top of the image.

There were immediate startled exclamations from the three others in the tent.

"My god, Jackie. That's your mystery fossil!" Joe almost shouted.

If Helen had had any lingering thoughts that A.J. was playing some kind of practical joke, this eliminated them. None of them had mentioned Jackie's unique find to him, and A.J. certainly had never had a chance to see it.

Yet there was no doubt about it. The "shell" Jackie had found was now revealed to be one of many sequential components in what appeared to be some kind of arm.

"And the… tentacle on the right," Joe said, pointing. "There. It's shorter than the others. I'll bet that it lost part of the arm, maybe in a fight with the raptors, and so that part got weathered out."

"But what was it?" Helen demanded, returning to the main question. "How do those plates come into the picture? They're not armor-the attachment points make that clear. They're internal structures of some kind. But I don't see any ordinary bones or anything, so…"

"Maybe they are bones," Jackie suggested quietly.

Helen stopped short and looked more closely at the image. Her classes in reconstruction stood out more clearly now in her mind than ever before. She visualized the connections, the necessary methods for locomotion, the attachment points as related to the way the- arm plates?-were clearly meant to fit. She could see Joe's face going through the same steps, and that Joe was finding the conclusion hard to believe.