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"Complete bird, we gotta check it out," announced eagled-eyed Luke the Navigator, who had spotted the feathered carcass against yellowed grass on our way back to camp, one afternoon.  I swung the Land Rover around.  Sure enough, a large vulture lay there, untouched by scavengers, but swarmed by hundreds of dermestid beetles that were fast reducing its remains to a skeleton.  "It's virtually intact, we've got every bone," I observed, while Luke bagged the reeking remains. "This is going to be a great addition to the bone collection back at the University of Chicago," Andy Gray observed as he helped scoop up the specimen. We could hear the beetles scratching around in the bag as Luke and Andy tied it to the roof rack.A Predator's Promise

We are, however, on a paleontology expedition, and this is our primary obsession.

I caught my breath when I spotted the three-inch-long neck vertebra on the side of a hill.  Walking carefully along the trail of fragments, I spotted the rest of the neck diving into the red rock.  Other slender bones projected from the hillside.  "I think it's a small theropod!" I yelled out, and called French paleontologist Ronan Allain over to the site.  Ronan, who just finished his doctorate on predatory dinosaurs from France, was wide-eyed as he began to pour over the bones beside me.  "They're hollow and the neck is clearly inclined upward" he noted.  Other team members arrived and helped brush back the sediment and gather wayward pieces. Each of us knew what the others were thinking: "Could this possibly be a raptor?"...continued