"Really, truly, Jackie," Helen said. "I've never seen anything like it, or heard of anything like it. You say you know where you found it?"

Jackie looked hurt. "Of course I do, Helen! Haven't I been keeping a journal since my second year doing this?"

"I'm sorry. I should have said: will you show us where you found it, and where you think it came from?"

"Of course. Let me get my hiking boots on, and we'll go out there now."

"There" turned out to be a few miles out, not all that far from the old dig site, but to the northwest up a small arroyo. "I found it lying over here, half under some sand. I think it washed down from somewhere up the arroyo."

Helen measured the area by eye, trying to visualize the rains, the wash coming down, the size of the fossil.

She thought Jackie was right. "Let's go up a ways, then, and see if we find anything."

Luck, luck, luck.

The word kept repeating itself over and over in Helen's mind, as she stood there looking at the wall of the arroyo in a state of half-shock.

"Jesus Christ," Joe repeated for the fifth time, finally straightening up from his examination. "Helen, that's a Deinonychus, or I'm just a first-year student."

"And if the rest is in the same condition, we've got ourselves a fully articulated skeleton."

Amateur or not, Jackie understood how very rare that was, and her excitement was only restrained by an attempt to be more professional and dignified than the professionals around her. Theropod skeletons, like the Deinonychus, were rare enough to be noteworthy, but fully articulated skeletons-skeletons that had remained pretty much connected as they had been in life-were vanishingly rare.