Larry Walker faces a dilemma: He can continue to study the dinosaur fossils he happened upon in the southern Utah desert or give up the site to science. He spends three years illegally mining the site on federal land and sells bones on the black market, attracting the attention of paleontologists and law enforcement officials. Walker tries, and fails, to anonymously hand over the site. Giving up the dinosaur now calls for the riskiest of moves.

The answers waited at the end of a desolate dirt road in southern Utah's badlands.

Or perhaps this cloak-and-dagger meeting would fizzle into yet another false lead.

With these conflicting thoughts running through his head in late 2001, James Kirkland turned his truck off one of the anonymous Ranch Exits that dot Interstate 70's lonely Utah stretch.

Pushing deeper into the desert, the successive trails grew less navigable. At times, Kirkland would nearly stop to maneuver over a parched creek bed or through a cluster of rocks.

A mysterious man stood at the end of a four-wheel-drive trail that fades to nothing just short of a cliff. The face-to-face desert meeting, arranged over the phone, could hold the answers to Kirkland's questions.

Over the years, stories of a new therizinosaur being dug illegally from somewhere in southern Utah had teased Kirkland, Utah's state paleontologist. Each new rumor further fueled his desire for this dinosaur, which could be the earliest known member of its family.

Hidden in this forbidding landscape, a place where few plants are hardy enough to survive, awaited the ultimate treasure.

Kirkland's thoughts drifted back to his wife, who objected to her husband dashing off to a secret rendezvous with some stranger in the desert.

Though he was nervous, the lure of this therizinosaur proved too strong.

"If the guy wanted to shoot me, there's a lot easier ways of doing it," Kirkland said.

As Kirkland rumbled his way toward the meeting spot, an unassuming man with a close-cropped goatee and glasses came into view. Kirkland parked and walked the last hundred yards past the sagebrush and Mormon tea toward the man.

The stranger extended his hand. "Howdy, I'm Larry Walker."

Walker had spent three clandestine years in the desert with an X-Acto knife pulling out bone after bone from a dinosaur death bed. He suspected the fossils could be an important new species for science.

But because his actions violated the law, Walker tried to preserve his anonymity by working through a third party.

Retired doctor John Scandizzo agreed to help, using Walker's information to direct a paleontologist to the location.

Walker had even provided the site's GPS coordinates - through Scandizzo - to no avail. To turn over this dinosaur, Walker would have to walk Kirkland right to the site. Emerging from the shadows, Walker risked his freedom. As much as he wanted this dinosaur to be properly researched, Walker also feared a trap.

He reached the site a half-hour early. Stopping along the dirt road, he examined the dusty ground. Fresh tire tracks might indicate whether FBI agents had been out that day.

Seeing no tracks, he continued to the meeting place, and soon spotted a lone white truck coming around the final bend. The vehicle parked about 100 yards away and Kirkland, with his unkempt head of brown hair, exited.

After a short hike through the desert, the pair approached the Cedar Mountain formation, which amounts to a stone river that snakes through southern Utah.

At one point, Walker began heading toward what appeared to be a non-Cedar Mountain set of rocks, which mildly alarmed Kirkland. The rocks didn't look like they could yield the few bones Kirkland had seen.

Walker assured Kirkland this was the site of his dig. Several small mine shafts came into view.

It slowly dawned on Kirkland that he had stood within 100 feet of this very spot, but never walked close enough to see the holes.

Most parts of the Cedar Mountain formation of this age once supported vast forests. In general, the roots of these trees would have destroyed any bones that happened to be buried there.

For some reason, this swath of formation remained tree-free, preserving the bones Walker had spent countless hours exposing,

"I was really flabbergasted as to how close I was," Kirkland said.

Walker mentioned he and Kirkland had met briefly years before.

Walker attended a lecture about dinosaur discoveries at the productive Dalton Wells Quarry on state property near Moab. Walker asked why Lin Ottinger, southern Utah's elder statesman of rock shop owners, couldn't sell bones from the site.

Though not the speaker, Kirkland took the stage to answer the question. From Kirkland's recollection, he calmly explained that dinosaur bones belong to the public and that scientists needed unfettered access to all bones to describe these new creatures.

After remembering the encounter, Kirkland thought his answer had played a role in Walker picking him to receive this new dinosaur species.

When Walker recalled the lecture, he remembered a more strongly worded answer that left him with the impression Kirkland wasn't someone he wanted to debate on the topic.

It's hard to say what impact that conversation had on Walker, as he went on to secretly mine a dinosaur site for three years and sell excess bones on the black market.

But in the end, Walker decided that the skeleton he had reconstructed belonged in the science community.

Kirkland told Walker how much he appreciated the gesture of turning over the site. Kirkland stressed that he wouldn't report Walker to the federal authorities. But, if the BLM or the FBI approached him, he would come clean.

Walker was prepared to face the law, if it came to that, though neither he nor Kirkland considered that this crime would carry jail time.

For now, they savored the moment as they gazed at the mass graveyard of a dinosaur that would go on to make international headlines.

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Epilogue: In May, Utah state paleontologist James Kirkland fielded media calls from around the world when the science journal Nature officially announced the discovery of Falcarius utahensis, seen as a missing link between carnivorous ancestors and vegetarians in one family of dinosaurs. This therizinosaur could become one the best studied dinosaurs found to date, since so many of the beasts are left to unearth at the site now being worked by Utah paleontologists.

Larry Walker, the Utahn who found the site, eventually confessed to illegally removing dinosaur fossils from federal land. He spent five months in a Nevada federal prison, was sentenced to 36 months of supervised release and was ordered to pay restitution of $15,000.

While he disagrees with the law, he understands he broke it. "They taught me a lesson," Walker said. "I won't try to fight the system anymore."

If Walker had come forward at the start, the dinosaur might be named Falcarius walkeri. But paleontologists would not name the creature after someone who illegally sold parts of the dinosaur.

Walker is back living in southern Utah, where he is trying to work within the law to obtain agate material found on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property.