Clayton Kennedy knows what it's like to reassemble the Cretaceous one bone at time. The Canadian Museum of Nature palaeontology technician recently mounted the cast of a Carnotaurus sastrei dinosaur skeleton. Here's his six-step guide to building a dinosaur skeleton.

1 / Remove the fossil bones from the rock. Replace missing bones with replicas. 2 / Compare the skeleton with scientific descriptions of other similar dinosaurs.

Dinosaur skeletons vary greatly -- think Velociraptor compared to Triceratops. Thus it's essential to have a good general knowledge of anatomy. Then you can compare your dinosaur bones with those that other palaeontologists have already described. 3 / Figure out how the bones fit together. Bones are held together with muscles, ligaments and tendons. The spaces between the bones are padded with cartilage. Dinosaur fossils show ridges and roughened patches where muscles attached.