Sixty-six million years after the last dinosaurs walked the earth, a golf ball-sized nodule of fossilized feces found in Montana's Hell Creek Formation has offered an unexpected glimpse into the final chapter of the dinosaur age. Inside the coprolite — itself a rarity in the fossil record — researchers discovered a three-dimensionally preserved feather, fish scales, and bird bones, a layered record of predation frozen at the very edge of mass extinction. The find is prompting scientists to reconsider what separated the birds that perished from those that endured: not merely luck, but the sophi