[2] Expanded from his Hugo Award-winning story "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur", Bones of the Earth spans geologic time, not just centuries but millennia, from the prehistoric past to the distant and unknown future.

Paleontologist Richard Leyster has reached the pinnacle of his profession: a position with the Smithsonian Museum plus a groundbreaking dinosaur fossil site he can research, publish on, and learn from for years to come.

There is nothing that could lure him away – until a disturbingly secretive stranger named Harry Griffin enters Leyster's office with an ice cooler and a job offer.

Alternately, both Leyster's and Griffin's chief rival, trusted colleague, despised nemesis, and inscrutable lover at various junctures throughout time, Salley is relentlessly driven to tamper with the working mechanisms of natural law, audaciously trespassing in forbidden areas, pushing paradox to the edge no matter what the consequences may be.

And, when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever lived, the consequences become terrifying indeed, resulting in a team of "bone men" becoming stranded for two years in the Mesozoic Era.

And the possibility of the Chicxulub impactor having been so great as to detune the song of the Earth for a decade or a century, deafening the dinosaurs so they could not migrate, causing them to starve.

In the end, the evolved avians decide to retroactively remove the time travel science from human hands, thereby rendering all of the events up to that point irrelevant.