Hunter believes she has a treasure

You never know what you're going to find when you start rummaging around in your old storage boxes. When Cha, the fossil hunter and owner of Cha For The Finest Gallery at 183 E. Hood Ave., started brushing away at some ugly old rocks in a box, she discovered what she believes to be rather unique dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous Epoch, 113 million years ago.

"If I had known what a treasure I had, I never would have left them in storage for six years," she said.

She recalled battling through thick clouds of chiggers and mosquitoes, and treading over soft, sticky sand riddled with tunnels of fire ants in the stifling, humid Texas heat to get to her digging site by a huge tree. She knew her hole was over a nesting site because of the petrified poop or regurgitation that surrounded the area, but what she found weren't the footprints she was expecting to find.

Among other things, she found the "Rosetta Stone" of embryos. The outer part had torn away revealing the pink agatized remains of a tiny sauropod - a gigantic herbivore. Anyone else might think this was a fossilized rock, but the fossil-hunter believes she was able to detect the nose and two umbilical cords leading from the placental mass, winding around the creature and entering its mouth.

"When I realized what I was looking at," she says, "I felt like I was seeing the beginning of all life suspended in time."

After this epiphany, she was able to recognize more embryos, like the T-Rex and others pictured, and understood how they formed inside the egg. She began cleaning the fossils she has at her gallery, which were encrusted with dinosaur doo-doo.

Cha has an eye for finding things most of us wouldn't notice in rocks. Like Michelangelo, she grinds away what doesn't belong and frees the image from the rock. As she was cleaning and processing the fossils using diamond burs and rotary brushes, she discovered what she believes are tiny heads, noses, teeth, feet, eggs, a little bird with feathers and a tiny stegosaurus in an egg among the collection. There were also skulls, some with flesh, some dried up heads that had petrified. Some look like puppies, puffins, eagles, rhinos, hippos and horses.

She has a theory about the blood and tissue fragments she found here in Sisters covered in dino doo-doo: A volcano exploded and blew the local dinosaurs to smithereens, which petrified immediately. Other reptiles came along later and ate the crispy body parts. What they couldn't digest, they excreted. Their poop, containing the petrified pieces of tissue, became fossilized again and were lost to paleontologists - until Cha came along.

The intrepid fossil carver, who came to Sisters via New Mexico and Alaska, now invites scientists to visit her gallery and inspect her findings, many of which she has cleaned and polished, and turned into jewelry. She hopes some of these embryos will be purchased by organizations and donated to institutions for further study.

Cha also invites local fossil collectors to bring their finds in to her store where she will examine them and tell you if she thinks you may have discovered something amazing, too.