The day started as usual for Chris. When he woke up he was in his red sleeping bag. He lay for a few moments on his cot and looked up at the morning sky. The sun wasn't quite up and there were clouds overhead.

"Feels a little cool today," he thought.

He put on his shorts with the big pockets and his Air France t-shirt with the sleeves cut off - the same clothes he'd worn yesterday - pushed his sleeping bag into its stuff sack, and carried his cot to the pile behind the tents. Then he got his toothbrush and toothpaste and his water bottle and walked next to the trucks to brush his teeth.

All of a sudden Dino, the camp dog, was running towards him at full speed.

"Dino!" called Chris, with toothpaste in his mouth. Dino made a wide circle around Chris and just kept running. Chris spit out his toothpaste on the ground, washed off his toothbrush with water from his water bottle and kicked a little dirt over the mess.

"Breakfast!" thought Chris.

"'Morning Chris," said Greg, as Chris got on the breakfast line. "There's coffee - REAL coffee," Greg informed Chris.

"Great!" said Chris as he poured granola into his bowl and added three spoonfuls of powdered milk. He topped it off with hot water from the kettle and mixed it around.

At the breakfast meeting Paul told everyone that they would work on excavating their discoveries in the morning, meet back for lunch at 12 and then prospect for new finds in the afternoon.

Chris put some burlap, water and plaster in the back of the Green Turbo Diesel land Rover he drove. They would need these things at the site for making plaster jackets. As everyone finished washing their breakfast dishes and brushing their teeth, Chris filled his water bottle and added two scoops of Gatorade juice mix. Then he added a little bit more, gave the bottle a shake to mix it up and got in the truck.

They were off.

Chris' team returned to the site that preserved the five-foot long lower jaws of an enormous crocodile. Only the lower jaws were preserved at the site, but it was an important site because the jaws were in nearly-perfect condition. They would be used to reconstruct a life-sized head and neck of the ancient crocodile. Chris had found this site and everyone called it "his croc."

Goofing around while prospecting, Chris holds part of a skull of an enormous crocodile where it would fit on his face.

"Chris, we're going to your croc this morning, right?" Allison had asked.

"Yup," he answered. He liked to imagine what it would be like if it really WAS his croc. He couldn't imagine having a 40-foot long crocodile as a pet in Chicago. What would he do - walk around with it on a leash? It just seemed too silly.

When the team met back for lunch, Chris took out his field book. Inside, there were columns of numbers followed by a date and a short description. Each number represented a different site that had been discovered. The team was up to site 96.

"Paul, are we going south today?" Chris called to Paul, who was filling up his plate with pasta leftovers from dinner the night before.

"Yeah. We'll head about three kilometers south and prospect that area. If it's good we'll stay for the whole afternoon," said Paul.

The team drove south three kilometers, bumping over the rocky parts and gliding over the sandy parts. When they came to a stop, everyone got out of the trucks.

Chris tightened the straps on his sandals and refilled his water bottle. He had some small plastic bags, a rock hammer, and his hat. He was ready to go.

Everyone went a different direction. Gabe, Greg and Allison headed northeast; Paul, Maga and Boube headed due East; Hans, Dave and Chris headed south east, and Jack and Eric headed west.

"Meet back in an hour and fifteen minutes - three o'clock!" called Paul a reminder to everyone.

Chris started prospecting. He walked and looked around him on the ground. Sometimes he saw something whitish, with broken edges. Sometimes it was bone and sometimes it was rock.

He saw a black, shiny, pointed thing in the sand. "Nice croc tooth!"  He put it in his plastic bag and took a drink of water. Ahead in the distance he could see Hans and Dave. They were on their hands and knees looking at something on the ground. Hans was brushing away the sand. Chris could see a lot of large pieces of broken bone and walked over towards them.

Then, all of a sudden he stopped and stared.

"What's this?" In front of him, peeking out of the ground, was a string of little white bones, all in a line.  Chris knelt down to take a closer look.

Vertebrae-backbones. And they were articulated, running one against the other. These bones hadn't been moved once the animal died. As he peered at the bones, he tried not to get too excited as he carefully tried to make sense of what he was looking at.

"These four vertebrae in the center are fused. They look like sacral vertebrae. No crocodiles have four fused sacrals. They only have two. No lizards have four fused sacrals. They only have two. Dinosaurs have four or more. Pterosaurs have four or more.  Could this be a small dinosaur?" he wondered.

"What are you looking at?" Hans walked up. Chris pointed.

"Wow! What is that?" asked Hans.

Dave walked up. "Holy cow! Is that a dinosaur?"

"I'm trying not to get too excited, but it either has to be a small dinosaur or it is a pterosaur. I don't know what else has four fused sacrals," explained Chris.

"I don't either," said Hans. "We better go back to the trucks. It's almost three. Paul is going to be very excited."

Chris (at top) works with Paul (right) and Greg to uncover his great find: a new, small carnivorous dinosaur.

A little while later everyone was hovered over Chris' discovery. Paul was crouched low, with his face close to the ground. Chris was next to him, showing him the site. "This could be part of the pelvis, the illium. And do you think this could be a cross section of a long bone. Maybe a thigh bone - the femur?"

"Chris. this is fantastic!" Paul exclaimed. "I don't know what this is. I've never seen anything like it! It's got to be either a dinosaur or a pterosaur. If it is a dinosaur, it's one of the smallest ever found! There could be more in the ground. This is a very exciting discovery."

Hans said, "The croc site Gabe found is site 97.  The site Eric found with the sauropod tail bones is 98. Greg's site with the small teeth and bones is 99. That makes this site number 100!"

Everyone took photos of Chris with his amazing discovery. Then they gathered any fragments on the surface and put them in a pile. Before they knew it, it was six o'clock and the sun was beginning to set.

"We've got to go. We'll come back tomorrow and get a better sense of what you've found, Chris. Good work," said Paul, and patted Chris on the back. Chris smiled.

"Who's cooking tonight?" asked Allison as the team got in the car.

"Chris and Eric," answered Gabe.

"YUM! Mac and cheese for dinner!" Macaroni and cheese was Chris' specialty. He made it with bright orange powdered cheddar cheese, powdered milk, powdered butter and a little bit of water.

As the water boiled on the camp stove, Chris noticed lightning in the sky to the west. It lit up huge puffy clouds. "That's some big lightning."

He and Eric drained the macaroni and mixed in the cheese. The wind started picking up and the sky, which had been bright with moonlight a few moments before, grew dark and it was hard to see.

"Dinner!" Eric called and everyone lined up to eat. Just then, the winds grew fierce and were filled with sand. "It's a sand storm!" Jack yelled.  A sleeping bag started to blow away and Paul ran after it.

Everyone scattered. Some people pulled their chairs into the kitchen tent for protection. Some people scrambled into the trucks and rolled up the windows.

As Chris sat in the driver's seat of the Green Turbo Diesel LandRover and ate his mac and cheese, the truck rocked a little in the wind. He thought of his cot, his red sleeping bag. He had a feeling it would be a dusty night.

Chris smiled as he thought to himself, "This has been a great day!"