oe Carter and his students have brought a piece of North Carolina natural history back to life. In February they unveiled the result of more than seven years of work — the reassembled partial skeleton of a 221-million-year-old reptile known as a rauisuchian. To most people, the rauisuchian skeleton looks like that of a dinosaur. The rauisuchian, though, was not a dinosaur but a land-dwelling, predatory reptile related to crocodiles.

Carter, professor of geology, took on this project in late 1994 after then-undergraduates Brian Coffey and Marco Brewer brought him a few bones they had discovered in a quarry south of Durham, N.C. The team dug up 150 pounds of rock and began sorting through it, slowly realizing they had something special (see "The Predator in the Stone," Winter 2000 Endeavors). The fossil is the first rauisuchian found in the eastern United States.

"This guy was built something like a football player with a thick neck, powerful shoulders, and long arms," Carter says. "Unique for rauisuchians, it also had a thumb hooked into the base of his second finger to make a powerful pincer-like grip. When you put those together, you’ve got a really super predator."

Many students — including freshmen in Carolina’s first-year seminar program — helped assemble the skeleton.