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into the dense rock on the next hill. He saw the kids working around the jackhammer, moving away the big pieces of rock after checking them for fossils. At the foot of the hill, he saw the six tipis of his camp, the flapping mess tent, and the trailer that served as their field laboratory. And he saw Ellie waving to him, from the shadow of the field laboratory.
    “Visitor!” she called, and pointed to the east.
    Grant saw the cloud of dust, and the blue Ford sedan bouncing over the rutted road toward them. He glanced at his watch: right on time. On the other hill, the kids looked up with interest. They didn’t get many visitors in Snakewater, and there had been a lot of speculation about what a lawyer from the Environmental Protection Agency would want to see Alan Grant about.
    But Grant knew that paleontology, the study of extinct life, had in recent years taken on an unexpected relevance to the modern world. The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questionsabout the weather, deforestation, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed answerable, at least in part, with information from the past. Information that paleontologists could provide. He had been called as an expert witness twice in the past few years.
    Grant started down the hill to meet the car.
    The visitor coughed in the white dust as he slammed the car door. “Bob Morris, EPA,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m with the San Francisco office.”
    Grant introduced himself and said, “You look hot. Want a beer?”
    “Jesus, yeah.” Morris was in his late twenties, wearing a tie, and pants from a business suit. He carried a briefcase. His wing-tip shoes crunched on the rocks as they walked toward the trailer.
    “When I first came over the hill, I thought this was an Indian reservation,” Morris said, pointing to the tipis.
    “No,” Grant said. “Just the best way to live out here.” Grant explained that in 1978, the first year of the excavations, they had come out in North Slope octahedral tents, the most advanced available. But the tents always blew over in the wind. They tried other kinds of tents, with the same result. Finally they started putting up tipis, which were larger inside, more comfortable, and more stable in wind. “These’re Blackfoot tipis, built around four poles,” Grant said. “Sioux tipis are built around three. But this used to be Blackfoot territory, so we thought …”
    “Uh-huh,” Morris said. “Very fitting.” He squinted at the desolate landscape and shook his head. “How long you been out here?”
    “About sixty cases,” Grant said. When Morris looked surprised, he explained, “We measure time in beer. We start in June with a hundred cases. We’ve gone through about sixty so far.”
    “Sixty-three, to be exact,” Ellie Sattler said, as they reached the trailer. Grant was amused to see Morris gaping at her. Ellie was wearing cut-off jeans and a workshirt tied at her midriff. She was twenty-four and darkly tanned. Her blond hair was pulled back.
    “Ellie keeps us going,” Grant said, introducing her. “She’s very good at what she does.”
    “What does she do?” Morris asked.
    “Paleobotany,” Ellie said. “And I also do the standard field preps.” She opened the door and they went inside.
    The air conditioning in the trailer only brought the temperature down to eighty-five degrees, but it seemed cool after the middayheat. The trailer had a series of long wooden tables, with tiny bone specimens neatly laid out, tagged and labeled. Farther along were ceramic dishes and crocks. There was a strong odor of vinegar.
    Morris glanced at the bones. “I thought dinosaurs were big,” he said.
    “They were,” Ellie said. “But everything you see here comes from babies. Snakewater is important primarily because of the number of dinosaur nesting sites here. Until we started this work, there were hardly any infant dinosaurs known. Only one nest had ever been found, in the Gobi Desert. We’ve