Dinosaur fossils spill from the hills around the tiny village of Berivotra in northwestern Madagascar. The bones are exquisitely preserved, giving the impression that the beasts died within the past few months instead of 75 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous. Unfortunately, the thick grass covering much of the terrain tends to thwart the efforts of fossil hunters like us. So at one promising hill, we dug a fire trench and stood back to watch Retsieva, a Berivotra resident, set fire to a small area of waist-high grass. As a dark plume of smoke arose, even the most positive thinkers among us never imagined that this nondescript hillside would become the most important paleontological site ever discovered in Madagascar and one of the most significant found anywhere in the world in recent years.
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