These aren't the stories your mother told you.

No, these are the other stories.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Wanted Tour Guide

Written by Ali Habashi

Narrated by Harry Dobby

I stared into the empty

I stared into the empty sockets

Through the thin V-shaped jawbone and straight down into the

delicate curling rib cage. It was near closing time, but I still glanced around before leaning

closer to the three-foot tall Bambi wrapped a fine burgy fossil. Hello Bambi, I whispered through a smile.

My fingers itched to trace the twig-like jumble of bones from the tip of its dark skull all the way down its spine, where a line of feathers might have grown about 80 million years ago.

Bambi certainly wasn't one of the most impressive fossils on display at the Rocky

Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center at first glance, especially after having walked beneath

the winding grandeur of the massive Tylosaurus suspended from the ceiling, its teeth clamped

down in frozen violence on another unfortunate fossil.

What made Bambi special was not something as obvious as size.

I tore my eyes away from the empty gaze of my favorite display

and walked in the direction of the lab.

The skulls were watching me, or at least the real ones were. I nodded subtly to some,

grinned happily at others, and smirked at the towering figure of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

I wondered absently if the museum staff had found the rusty stains on its plastic bones yet.

...