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.

Companies welcome Schneider into their mines as long as he and his crew wear hard hats, stay clear of heavy equipment and don't disclose precise locations. None tolerate unapproved visitors.

The museum takes ownership of whatever fossils Schneider finds. Most are stored in crates and cabinets in its orderly basement, where much of its scientific collections reside. One day, if the museum raises enough money to erect another downtown Raleigh building, it intends to showcase them.

Visitors to a proposed Nature Research Center would watch Schneider and others extract the fossils from stone -- and encounter the lessons they teach. Already, scientists from New York, Washington, Virginia and New Mexico are collaborating on studies using museum bones.

"We've got only a few little windows," Schneider said of three mines yielding the most fossils. "But there are bones all over the place."

Still, they don't always want to come out.

Understanding evolution

On an August morning, Schneider parked at the Chatham County clay mine. He hustled directly to the boulders, hopping on them with the ease of a kid walking in the woods. Then he saw the limb bone.

At first, he didn't recognize how good it was. After putting on safety glasses and a dust mask, he yanked the cord on a gas-powered rock saw. He cut a small square around the bone. Choking peach-colored dust billowed around him.

Then Leah Fuller, a museum technician, and volunteer Dick Webb took turns hammering metal chisels. They wanted to dig below the bone and break off the chunk of rock holding the fossil. Then a chisel sliced the bone. It was longer than they thought. That made it more valuable.

Schneider had found what looked like a humerus curved inside the rock, probably from a dicynodont, a tusked and lumbering hog-sized creature that likely lived in packs. The afternoon was waning, so they wrapped the scars in the rock with shiny aluminum foil and piled chunks of stone on top to protect it. They would try again on their next trip.

They keep at it because the bones are opening a new view of long-extinct species. Triassic reptiles were less likely to walk on two feet or be agile like the dinosaurs that flourished millions of years later. They were more likely to be armored.

Phytosaurs were short-legged reptiles with crocodilelike snouts. Sphenosuchians were true crocodile cousins that sometimes walked upright as many dinosaurs did. Aetosaurs wore bony plating from their necks to the ends of their reptilian tails.

Their remains could help scientists see which Triassic animals lived here but not elsewhere during their day. Researchers still puzzle over why only some survived the mass extinction that closed the Triassic 200 million years ago, long before a big extinction killed off dinosaurs after the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. It wasn't until then that mammals had a chance to dominate Earth.

One Triassic group of animals, traversodonts, was an ancestor to modern mammals and might have had fur. Schneider has dug up so many traversodont skulls in the Piedmont that a Columbia University graduate student is examining them to see how the babies changed as they grew to adults.

Scientists are looking for any clues they can find to explain which animals evolved from others and in what order.

"Everything we know and are familiar with evolved from those animals -- not only those of the modern world but of those times in between," said Paul E. Olsen, a Columbia University paleontologist who has studied the Triassic for 30 years. "If you want to understand the way things are now, you need to look back in time."

A bone to pick

On a September morning, Schneider and his team returned to the clay pit. They thought they would extract the humerus with a few more cuts.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Schneider was churning up plumes of dust with his saw, making a deeper cut into the edge of the square. Then Fuller and Webb got to work with the chisels, hammering until their hands got numb.

They traded off. Schneider used his whining saw to work on the groove in the rock, coating his blue jeans and gray T-shirt with reddish grit. Then Fuller and Webb took turns with the chisels.

By 2:30 p.m., the trough around the bone was more than 6 inches deep. But the tough rock would not separate below the bone. The pounding sheared off a chunk of rock, and a piece of the fossil came with it.

Schneider quickly wrapped it in foil. He poured some glue over the embedded bone to keep the rest in place. He placed three chisels at once in grooves at the bottom of the box carved into the rock and started hitting them hard.

"Oh, come on," he complained to no one in particular. "Why can't this rock crack?"

By 3:30 p.m., Schneider had eaten up seven round saw blades. The fossil was still stuck. Next time, he would bring a hammer drill. They sealed the rock again with foil and stone.

Bulldozed

Cutting out a fossil out is just a first step. Next comes the need to separate stone from bone. Schneider, N.C. State University graduate students and volunteers do that in the museum's basement laboratory. Extracting one set of bones with tiny vibrating drills, even a partial skeleton, can take hundreds of hours.

That work -- and restrictions on state employee travel because of gas prices after Hurricane Katrina -- kept Schneider and his team out of the field for weeks.

In October, they returned to the mine with the hammer drill and a generator to power it. Schneider, Fuller and Webb climbed back on the boulder pile to find the fossil.

It was gone.

In the ever-busy pit, bulldozers must have rearranged the rock pile -- an occupational risk for paleontologists working in a clay mine. The stubborn boulder probably was flipped. What was found was lost again.

"We'll probably never see it," Schneider said. "That's only the second one I've lost like that all these years."

But they kept looking for fossils, this time on another pile where Webb had spotted what looked like a tooth on an earlier visit. Before long, they clustered by a square Fuller had scratched on the surface of a rock with the spike end of a field hammer. Embedded in it was what looked like a piece of a small jaw.

As they dug, it became clear the bone extended deeper than they thought. That was good. More depth meant more remains.

Best of all, it took less than half an hour to yank out. It looked like the lower jaw of a traversodont, the ancient mammal-like creature that North Carolina soils are yielding in abundance.

"Not bad," Schneider said, his mood lifting.