A few years ago, Sasha showed me a new dinosaur fossil from Uzbekistan at a conference. He whisked me up to his room, ceremoniously opened an ornately colored orange-and-green cardboard box, and pulled out part of the skull of a meat-eater. He put the fossil back in the box and handed it to me so I could take it back to Edinburgh to CAT-scan it. But before he let go, he looked me in the eye and, in the Russian-accented drawl of movie bad guys, said, “Be careful with the fossil, but be even more careful with the box. This is Soviet box. They don’t make them like this anymore.” Grinning with
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