The freezing and thawing of ice over the last winter had pried the rock apart. Wind had blown and rain had fallen in the spring wearing the rocks and exposing the new surface with the fossils plainly showing. The same natural forces that had exposed the fossils could now destroy them. So, the men had carefully covered them to preserve them for the fieldwork in the Spring.

Elena continued her research, surfing the web and reading everything she could find in the school library about dinosaurs. In December she received a note from Dr. Parker saying that he had finished writing the grant proposals and project plan. Over the next few weeks he and his colleagues would fine tune the work and then submit them to the state in January.

For Christmas, Elena received a Paleontology Dictionary from her parents. She pored over the pages learning new words and memorizing the names, sizes and eras of the different dinosaurs. Spring seemed an eternity away.

The end of February brought another letter from Dr. Parker. The University had gotten the necessary grants and approvals to go ahead with the dig. Dr. Parker would be bringing a field class of six graduate students to work on the project. They would arrive at the end of May. Dr. Parker had also been able to obtain permission for her to work on the site as a junior field student.

Elena whooped and hollered, waking Levi from a nap. This of course earned her a scolding from grandma. Elena could not help but smile all the way through grandma's speech. So, she tried to respectfully stare at her feet and look penitent. Elena was able to carry out a convincing enough apology, after which she ran gleefully to her room to write it all in the logbook she had been keeping.

May finally arrived with melting snow and muddy roads. The ice went out of the river and the usual flood threats came and went without materializing. Elena watched as the snow melted at higher and higher elevations up the mountain.

Finally, in mid May Elena was able to convince her father to take her up to the fossil site. They took their four wheeler through the mud and much as far as they could go and then got off to push through the brush and scramble up the hillside to the blue tarp covered with dirt and little piles of snow that were losing their battle against the sun.

Elena was both relieved and disappointed on seeing it. She was relieved to see it still there protecting the fossils beneath. She was disappointed by how plain it looked. Over the winter this place had taken on magical qualities in her mind, and here it was covered up with a plain blue tarp, just like the woodpile and snow machines and a hundred other things in the village.

She looked up at her father who was walking around the edge of the tarp checking to be sure it was holding firmly in place. "These tarps are amazing," he said. "They will hold up to just about any kind of weather. I'll bet those bones you found were kept safe and dry all winter."

The magic seemed to pulse back to life with his words. Elena knew that the most extraordinary things were often covered with the most ordinary. She longed to remove just an edge of the tarp to take a peek inside. She knew however that even if she could, all she would see was the dirt they had covered the fossils with to protect them. Elena and her father left the site satisfied that it had weathered the winter.

Dr. Parker's team arrived the last week of May. They were able to set up sleeping places in the school and rent four wheelers from some of Elena's neighbors. They arrived with several crates of equipment, which they were now loading onto the four wheelers. There seemed to be so many of them. Elena looked for Dr. Parker in the group. She finally found him tying some PVC pipe onto a four wheeler.

"Hi, Dr Parker, can I help you tie that on?" Elena asked.

"Elena, how very nice to see you. Yes, could you please hold the pipe up while I look for another bungee cord?" Dr Parker replied. Dr. Parker rummaged around in a backpack finally finding just the right one and hooked in on to hold the pipe in place.

"Elena, how very nice to see you. Yes, could you please hold the pipe up while I look for another bungee cord?" Dr Parker replied. Dr. Parker rummaged around in a backpack finally finding just the right one and hooked in on to hold the pipe in place.

"We are going to use these pipes to help make a grid across the fossil site. It's important that when we get everything back to the lab, we will still be able to show where each thing we found came from on the site. So, we make a grid, of squares, like graph paper. Then, we give each square in the grid a letter and a number. When we find something, we write down which square we found it in." he explained.

Elena spent the next few hours helping the field crew move the supplies up to the site. Some workers set up tents while others continued delivering the equipment. The professor and his field assistant Lisa set up kind of a makeshift office in one of the tents. Elena helped them unpack maps and books about dinosaurs, a laptop computer, notebooks, plastic bags to hold samples of things, markers and boxes of files to keep track of each step of the project.

Another tent was set up to store equipment and to protect the fossils as they were dug up. When Elena went to visit the equipment tent, Andy and Sam were laying out the tools. There were brushes of all sizes, brooms, and dustpans, pails, tarps, ropes and shovels. "This is all stuff we have around the house." Elena commented. "I thought there would be more tools that looked more like what a paleontologist would have."

Andy smiled, "Well, a lot of the tools are pretty ordinary. You have to move dirt from one place to another. It's ordinary, dirty work."

"But, you have to move it very carefully so you don't miss anything. So, it can be ordinary, dirty, tedious work." Sam added. "See these screens? After we dig up dirt and rock and remove it, it's called talus. The talus is labeled in buckets for each square on the grid. Then it needs to be sifted through the screens to be sure nothing was missed. It's a slow process but when you find something, Whoa! Is it worth it!"

"We also have some more interesting tools like a concrete saw, that's for bigger work. For really tiny intricate work around a bone we use a dental pick." Andy showed Elena a tiny metal pick like the one a dentist had used to clean her teeth last month. The curved end looked like just a thin wire.

Sam picked up a rock pick. "We have the big kind of pick too, but we wouldn't want to use that on delicate work."

Andy arranged some bottles in a row. "We can also use chemicals like this hydrochloric acid to dissolve the rock from around the bone. There are many different ways to work on the fossils. It's important to know which method would be the safest for the fossil."

The village had a potluck for the workers at the school that night. Everyone had a lot of fun talking and enjoying the food. Elena's mother allowed her to stay late. As the final people were cleaning up and leaving, the field workers got together to discuss the plans for next day. Tomorrow, they would survey the site and set up the grid. Maps would be made and buckets would be numbered. By late afternoon, they should be able to remove the protective layer of soil that had been put there last fall. At home that night snuggled in her bed, Elena could hardly sleep for the excitement of it all.

The next day was spent holding this here, and fetching that there, taking messages, and in general running around. Elena was glad to find ways to be useful. She listened carefully to each discussion. When a problem came up, the workers discussed it and offered different solutions. Together they would work out the problem.

Finally the time came to remove the dirt from the site. Individuals worked in the metered out squares removing the layer of topsoil that had been put down. Slowly, the fossils were uncovered; brushes and brooms were used to remove the last few inches of dirt. The field students were energetic with the excitement of seeing the fossils for the first time. They took turns patting Elena on the shoulder, congratulating her like a proud new mother. Elena beamed as brightly as the slowly setting sun.

The next few weeks went quickly for Elena. She watched, as the fossils were slowly uncovered from the rock, helping when she could. Each piece was photographed, measured, numbered and cataloged. Some pieces were cut out with the rock still surrounding it. These pieces would be prepared in the lab at the University.

Elena helped Lisa cover some of the larger pieces with a jacket of plaster and strips of burlap. The jacket would protect the fossil from damage while being transported to the lab. Other fossils were covered with polyvinylacetate, sometimes called "vinac". The vinac was painted on like varnish to protect and preserve the fossils.

At the end of each day the site was carefully cleaned off. The tools were all put away and the paper work was double-checked. While Lisa and Dr. Parker worked on the paper work and the other members of the crew sat around talking, Elena wrote the days proceedings in her log. She felt like a member of the team. She liked the work and camaraderie. Sam was right, there were times when it was tedious. Elena wondered how many hours she had spent sifting talus through a screen. However, the day she found a single, small, shell embedded in a piece of rock had made it well worth it.

Elena had changed her theory of what kind of dinosaur it was many times. Her latest guess was based on a very exciting find. Just two days ago Sam had uncovered some bones that turned out to be the toes. Dr. Parker was able to determine from the bones that the dinosaur was a three-toed type of dinosaur. He was also able to tell that the dinosaur walked on its toes, not on its heels. Elena listened as the students discussed the fact that they had not found any claws. Some insisted that they were sure that it was not a carnivore if they had not found any claws. Other students pointed out that there could have been claws, but they might not have been found.

Elena thought about the evidence that they had found. She had been able to eliminate many dinosaurs from the possibilities, but she had not been able to say for sure that one dinosaur was it! Dr. Parker had explained that this was often true in science. Again she took out her log book and wrote in it the new clues. She looked through her books of dinosaurs focusing on three-toed herbivores. She wrote down her final guess.

Elena had changed her theory about what kind of dinosaur the fossils were many times over the last year. Now, she felt fairly confident that she knew.

That evening Elena again pored over her notes. "I will choose another dinosaur that I think it could be.":

(1) The dinosaur is from the Late Cretaceous Period.
(2)The bones are too big to be one of the smaller dinosaurs.
(3) The dinosaur walked on the tips of three toes and didn't appear to have claws.

So, I will guess it is a __________________________ .

What should Elena do?