RAPTOR RED

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the amateur fossil-hunters who donate their weekends and vacations to enlarging our appreciation of the past. In Wyoming we call them the Jurassic Irregulars. They work long hours without museum salaries, without government grants, and all too often without appreciation from the Ph.D.s, and. yet these amateurs are discovering new dinosaur species every summer.

Most of the time they pay for their own gas and drive their own pickups into the badlands. When we open up a new quarry, they contribute bags of plaster and bundles of burlap. Those of us fortunate enough to work full-time in small western museums rely on volunteers at every stage in the exacting process of cleaning the fossils, interpreting the anatomical facts, and clothing the bones with flesh and skin.

I started thinking about Raptor Red when I heard that a veteran amateur fossil-hunter had discovered a remarkable dinosaur. Raptor Red has come back to life thanks to such people.