The fossils come out bone by bone, embedded in rock. Together they are making this state a mandatory stop for scientists trying to unlock secrets from a very distant past.

Schneider's finds -- from Durham, Chatham, Lee and Anson counties -- are 220 million years old. They date to the Triassic Period, a geologic era that predates the days when dinosaurs ruled Earth. They come mostly from reptiles that, while strangers to most people, include early relatives to all animals living today.

"What he is finding, in a word, is extraordinary," said Hans-Dieter Sues, collections director at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. "A lot of the animals he is finding we didn't know were in North Carolina, or we didn't know them at all."

Schneider, a self-taught fossil hunter and the paleontology curator at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, digs as often as he can. This fall, he packed a powerful hammer drill and a portable generator in his state-issued Chevy Suburban. A rock saw and hand chisels sat within easy reach.

He was determined to extract a limb bone, frozen into a boulder, that had defeated two previous attempts at removal.

"We need as many bones as we can get," said Schneider, 54, steering clear of bulldozers and dump trucks working a Chatham County clay pit southwest of Raleigh.

Few traces of the Triassic survive, especially in eastern North America. Anything he finds could be valuable.

An accidental discovery

Schneider's success started with someone else's blind luck.

In 1994, two UNC-Chapel Hill students stumbled upon remains of a Triassic predator, the Tyrannosaurus rex of its day, though smaller, in a clay pit outside Durham. That intrigued Schneider, who collected and tended museum fossils for years as a volunteer before becoming curator.

Triassic soils are abundant in central North Carolina in a string of basins, known as red beds, that cut through the Triangle and continue south. They formed about 220 million years ago, when what is now North America sat inside a giant continent called Pangea, linked to what is now Europe, Africa and South America.

As continent plates moved apart, ground ripped near their edges. Rivers and lakes flowed into resulting rifts. The bones of some creatures that died there got buried under sediments that washed through as well. Some, over hundreds of millions of years, were mineralized, a process that can preserve the true shape of bones.

Rare everywhere, Triassic fossils have been especially scant on the East Coast, where heavy vegetation and regular rainfall mean that soils close to the surface rarely lay undisturbed. But several brick mines digging up clay are exposing Triassic soils in North Carolina and, with them, many bones.

In some of the mines, bulldozers regularly dig the big rocks out of the red dirt they collect to make brick and pile the stones out of their way. After rain and wind erode the face of a dug-up boulder, embedded bones start to peek out.

In 1996, a bulldozer operator at a second clay pit spotted a rib silhouetted on a boulder. This time, Schneider knew he needed to start checking out the sites himself. Something about North Carolina seemed to be good for Triassic fossils.

Since then, in about 10 pits scattered over Piedmont counties, Schneider has found remnants of many Triassic animals. Some fossilized bones remained neatly lined up, preserving partial animal skeletons. Each one allows scientists to see some of what long-extinct animals might have looked like.

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