In response to questioning about flying reptiles from his father, Perry, during the ride, chattered steadily about pterodactyls of every shape and size, until they stopped at the Museum building. The boy took his father to the top floor, which was used as a workshop. Running along one whole side of the building was a long table, and there, spread out upon it, were a number of blocks of pinkish chalky stone. None of these blocks was more than a couple of feet long, and most of them were only a few inches in length, but from each of them protruded a brown substance which, on close examination, displayed itself as bone. The merchant looked at the fragments with interest, but also with a puzzled air.
“Is that all there is to it, just those little bits of stone?” he asked.
“Why, Father, what did you expect?”
“I thought you had almost a whole skeleton! That collector fellow told me there were very few bones missing.”
“There aren’t many of them lost, as a matter of fact,” the boy responded. “No, really, Father, it’s a bully specimen.”
“It doesn’t look it.”
“Wait just a second,” the boy rejoined, “and I’ll show you!”
He hurried to another part of the workshop and came back with a curiously shaped frame on which was stretched a piece of brown oiled-silk.
“What’s that?”
“One of the wings for the model,” the boy answered. He laid the frame down upon the table over the blocks that contained the bones, and, as though by magic, the whole shape of the great Pteranodon seemed to spring into view. The missing bones presented themselves to the imagination as though they were there, for the spread of the wing showed exactly how they would fit in. A group of little claws, that had been chiseled entirely free from the chalk, were carefully placed by Perry at the ends of the wing-fingers.