Although the people on shore reacted quickly enough, quite a few of the smaller pieces still drifted away.
They had to take apart two baskets and turn them into a sieve to catch the remaining scraps. Then they picked the little things out of the water one by one and laid them out on a spread of cloth to dry.
Using a few slightly larger fragments, though none was even half a palm wide, Kup finally found some features he could tentatively identify.
There was no doubt about it: these fragments were bones.
At least, Kup couldn't think of anything else with such a clearly defined dense outer layer, a porous interior, and joint surfaces that had partially survived because they were relatively sturdy.
To an amateur, they were just a disorderly pile of scraps to take back and hand in along with the rest. But to an older medical student just starting out, locked in an intense struggle with anatomy, they looked more like an especially challenging jigsaw puzzle.
As they recovered more pieces, quite a few reasonably sized fragments had accumulated on the cloth. Judging by his beginner's eye, they were at least within the bounds of what he could recognize, enough to estimate their general location.
With that in mind, he sat down nearby and tried to sort the bone fragments into groups, wondering whether they belonged to the target they were looking for or were simply some unlucky animal that had happened to be crushed beneath a rock.
In terms of their overall shape, one type accounted for a considerable portion of the fragments they had recovered so far.
They were badly shattered, but their cross-sections showed that they were relatively flat. A few of the longer ones had a slight curve.
After turning them over