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The top of its eight-inch-long skull butted up against the opposite edge. A peculiar little hind foot seemed to be kicking off one edge of the slab. The bones all looked to be intact and attached in the right order. This article is a selection from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Lucia RM Martino & James Di Loreto / Dept. The “dawn horse,” discovered near Kemmerer, was a two-foot-long mammal that had legs suited to running from predators and teeth suggesting a leafy diet. “You got a horse!” He started jumping up and down. “Might be a turtle, I don’t know.” He cleared a bit more and saw that the ordinary cracks in the stone had miraculously spared the fossil. “I got something really cool over here,” Tynsky called out to a helper. It was humpbacked, and the size of a border collie, but with details obscured by the limestone matrix, as if painted over with cake batter. He cleared a larger area, and the fossil began to take shape as a ghostly shadow across the newly exposed stone surface. He was expecting to find fossilized fish underneath. A fragment of stone broke away above the split. He chose a spot along an exposed edge and started to work at it with his chisel and his geological hammer. Tynsky, the third generation of his family to eke out a living from finding fossils there, knelt down beside a slab still embedded in the ground. Other quarries on this ridge were known for producing extraordinarily detailed and complete fossils, all from the bottom of an ancient lake. Heaps of discarded stone slabs lay around like broken pottery. With the season racing to its snowy end, he had little to show for a summer of hard work but the commonest sort of fish fossils. That point of land had become known as “Tom’s Folly” because of a previous fossil hunter’s inability to find anything in the quarry there. Tynsky was working on the tip of a ridge above a canyon in southwestern Wyoming.