We were in the Badlands of Alberta, dinosaur country, and we were hunting dinosaurs, 77-million-year-old dinosaurs.

Something caught my eye. I don’t know if it was the shape, the color or plain luck. I bent down to see what it was. It took only a minute to clear away the surrounding dirt, and I instantly recognized the shape. It was the sickle shape of a claw, five inches long and perfect. The tip was super sharp.

I poked around, and another bone quickly appeared. It was a toe bone, a big one. After about ten minutes, I had a small pile of bones sitting next to me. I dug away a bit of the overburden (extra dirt in the way of our excavation that was as burdensome as it sounds), and I came across a group of long, flat bones.

From looking at the claw, I had a suspicion that it was a theropod-a meat eater. I was astonished to learn that it was an early Tyrannosaur. It wasn’t a T. rex because it lived about 10 million years before the great beast. My best guess was a Daspletosaurus (das-PLEET a sawr us), an early cousin to T. rex, smaller but just as fierce. It was the top predator of its day.

It was time to do some serious digging. As some of us were moving earth, the others were uncovering more bones. The group of flat bones turned out to be six complete ribs. Finding intact ribs was a good sign that we would find the rest of the dinosaur still buried in the hill. Because they are so thin, it is common for ribs to break up and wash away. I was wondering how much more of my Daspletosaurus was here.