“He should come along any minute now,” I said to Pine. We’d been staking out the dried-up creek bed for about an hour, waiting for Tenontosaurus to wander down the ditch. Nuke had poofed and returned to me a long time ago. As the sun slipped behind a fast-building thunderhead, I’d worked a streak of …
I trailed into the mudroom behind my mom, who was lugging two heavy guitar cases at once. “Please don’t do this.” After a long morning of begging for mercy, my hostage negotiator voice was starting to slip into the whine zone. “There’s a dinosaur stomping around out there, and I need my magic to make …
Tenontosaurus tilletti Tenontosaurus tilletti is a widespread Cretaceous ornithopod with fossil evidence all over the western half of North America. This ancestor of Iguanodon stood around five feet at the shoulder, grew to exceed lengths of twenty feet, and is estimated to have weighed somewhere between one and two thousand pounds. It was able to …
We rode home from the party in the dark. I was too scared to break the silence. Mom parked in front of the ranch house and sat in the idling car. She gripped the steering wheel and stared ahead like we were still on the highway. “What happened back there?” Her perfectly even voice raised …
I tore off my blindfold, shoved through the paleo lab door, and stumbled out into Trinity Hall. In the middle of the exhibits and refreshment tables, a ring of party guests had gathered around a crater in the tile—and in that pit stood a hulking dinosaur the size of a longhorn steer. I’d never seen …
I stood in the middle of the new exhibit, Pine’s soulshine glowing in my chest. The zig-zagging hall was dim and empty, but I could hear other guests somewhere close by. They must’ve all gone ahead. As I took my first few steps into the dark, a projector spread flickering firelight across the wall, and …
Convolosaurus marri Convolosaurus marri is an early type of ornithopod, a group of dinosaurs known as “duck-bills.” The first ornithopods were plant-eaters with small bodies, slender limbs, and birdlike feet that gave them an edge to outrun predators. In 1985, a huge graveyard of these dinosaurs was discovered in Texas near Proctor Lake. From 488 …
“What I’m about to tell you will be hard to hear.” I recited my confession in the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine Mom’s point of view. In this party dress, with this sad, sorry face, how many years would I ground me? “But I want to start off by saying, I’m okay.” I glanced down …
Last night was too weird to be real. But when I woke up on the couch in the barn with scratches on my legs, greasy skin, and grass in my hair, I knew I’d been through something. I sat up, sore all over, and closed my gummy eyes to search for Pine’s soulshine. Just to …
I sat in my black dress with ruffly cap sleeves, surrounded by sympathy cards and flowers, waiting for Mom to get home from the funeral. I’d had this dream before. And this part, the beginning, was the only part of the nightmare that actually happened in real life. This was the day Mom went to …