Last summer, while spending a day with paleontologist Joe Peterson and his crew at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, I was lucky enough to find a dinosaur tooth. The shiny fossil had once fit into the mouth of a beaky herbivore called Camptosaurus, and, 150 million years later, was nothing more than an isolated crown. The tooth either broke off as the dinosaur fed, or snapped off the root sometime after the animal’s death.

I’ll probably never know how the tooth became divorced from the Camptosaurus jaw, but the nature of the Jurassic site where it rested indicates that the tooth probably did some postmortem traveling. Originally viewed as a mucky death trap where dozens of Allosaurus and other dinosaurs perished, newer