I'll be the first to admit it; the specimen was not much to look at. Seventy years after being dug out of the ground much of it had crumbled into four-foot-long Y, and the curved teeth that once stood upright in that jaw had slumped out of their sockets into the sulfur-smelling debris. All the same, it was an impressive sight.
During the past four years I have spent much of my free time reading about evolution and paleontology. Popular summaries, symposium volumes, technical papers; the numerous books that clutter my office and the disorganized mess of PDFs on my hard drive have taught me…