After fighting off paleontology robbers and a pistol-dueling horserace through the desert, I arrived at a dusty airstrip. Onto a rickety plane I loaded the fossilized dinosaur skull pictured above and sent it on to the Museum of Science and History. Once the rest of the dinosaur’s remains are unearthed and shipped, the museum display will include a placard referencing my discovery.
Uh-huh. Yeah, I could only wish.
The truth is that the above photograph depicts a rock. I just thought it looked a lot like the skull of something prehistoric. But if any experts out there are convinced that this is something other than pure rock, you’re welcome to foot the bill for our return visit. I will want that placard of discovery in my name.
The black disc is my camera lens cap, placed there for size context.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 17.9 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
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