Carnosaur Crimes Read Online Free PDF

months. This was the last picture.
    Ansel nervously fingered her Iniskim. Her drawings were usually group studies of interacting species or individual action poses showing the natural, daily behaviors of eating, hunting, or nesting. They resembled photographic scenes - so fine was her stroke and so realistic-looking her ink, watercolor, and airbrushing techniques, which she had perfected through years of experimentation and practice.
    Her work was well known in scientific circles because her renderings withstood the scrutiny of degreed academics who valued scientific accuracy based on zoology, botany, and environmental biology over subjective, artistic visualizations. She had learned early that their critical support was essential for establishing her professional reputation.
    This portrait of a recently discovered Giganotosaurus, however, had a demonic look. In life, the giant reptile stretched forty-five-feet long and weighed up to nine tons, bigger than the largest Tyrannosaurus ever found. More lightly built than its American cousin, Giganotosaurus had long legs, short arms with three-fingered claws, and a six foot skull.
    Ansel glanced at the towering piles of Giganotosaurus fossil photos, specimen drawings, skeletal measurements, environmental notes, and fossil site impressions the authors from South America had sent her. After studying this scientific data for weeks, her Giganotosaurus sketch resembled a tawdry comic book cover; two dimensional and distorted. Something had skewed her perspective and muddled her purpose.
    â€œThe poacher,” Ansel said out loud, remembering just how much seeing that burnt corpse hanging from the Allosaurus’ mouth had haunted her the past two days. Her revulsion and disbelief had spilled from her subconscious and onto the paper like poison weeping from a wound. Her creative juices were tainted.
    Disgusted, she rose from the stool and went over to a half-refrigerator beneath a counter in one corner of the room. She opened the door to find slim pickings. A six-pack of canned Coke. Bottled water. A plundered bag of bite-size Snickers. She pulled a Coke from its neck ring and pawed through the cold plastic pouch for the last two chocolate bars. Nervous energy made her ravenous.
    Ansel avoided the drawing board and plopped on the large pit sofa positioned on the other side of the room partitioned inside the large red airplane hangar. She’d purchased the steel building, along with her double-wide trailer, two years before. The large building contained the work shop where she had sculpted the first life-sized model of the museum’s Allosaurus and also stored a personal fossil collection. Munching on the first candy bar, she leaned into the leather cushions and stared up at the twenty-foot high ceiling joists.
    Who had tried to steal the river footprints? What kind of man would risk committing a felony to poach fossils? Did he have a wife? Children? Did anyone miss him and wonder what had happened to him? Ansel tore open the second candy wrapper.
    The poacher had known what he wanted and how to get it. Carnosaur bones were the rarest dinosaur remains to be found. Since large reptilian herbivores far outnumbered the carnivores, the complete fossil skeletons of large predator species were considered the holy grails of vertebrate paleontology.
    Although a nicely preserved footprint from a North American species like Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus, or Albertosaurus was considered only a trace fossil, it would still bring in thousands of dollars on the commercial black market. For the right price, a private collector, fossil dealer, or unscrupulous museum director could purchase one with no questions asked. She had to find out what was happening in the case.
    The next edition of the weekly
Big Toe Tracker
wasn’t out yet and though the local TV stations had swarmed around the museum like blowflies on sheep, they knew little or nothing about the vandalism or death. The FBI and the BLM