The student lowered his hand. "Why didn't he just reanimate a whale or elephant?"
"See?" She pointed at him. "He's smarter than Jeff was."
"Through the... sympathetic memories left behind in the bones? They remember how they used to be held and moved and you use that knowledge to command them," a student ventured meekly.
"Ma'am?"
"Speak up, I'm deaf in this ear."
"MA'AM!"
"BETTER. WHAT."
"Yes you can. In boxes. How do you think they got it to the museum?"
"But... to reanimate it? It'd be a jumbled up mess, in parts."
"Who knows what Rick here is TRYING to ask?"
"Oh that's easy!" another said. "The bones' sympathetic memories! They remember how they used to be held."
"The bones don't move. They stay in one big ol' jumbled heap.
"Who knows why?"
"Nope. Jeff was an idiot, but a smart idiot. He did his research and calculated everything out, made sure he had enough energy available to reanimate a corpse that size. The animating bonds got made just fine."
A pause for thought.
"They got MADE just fine, but making's the easy part. What's the hard part of reanimation?"
Hands shot up now. "Maintaining it!"
"The bonds didn't stick around!"
"Good. Why?"
"Who knows how fossils get made? Come on, ONE of you had to be a dinosaur nerd when you were little."
Eyes shifted around.
"Oh come on, we're all boneheads here. That's how we get into this field half the time. No nerd shaming in MY house."
His eyes lit up and he raised his hand higher.
He looked at his teacher, who eventually nodded.
"There's no bone in a fossil at all," he said. "It's a CAST of where bone USED to be, filled in with rock!"
"That there, Latonya, is why the bonds FORMED." The old one wrote some things on the board. "And with a bit of tweaking, they might have stuck around."
"Uh."
"Or any other dinosaur geeks. There's a big problem with showing megafauna fossils."
A pause, then two more hands shot up, but they didn't wait to be called on. "Complete fossils are rare!"
"Theeeeere we go. Takes a whole different set of rules and spellcraft tricks to make THAT work."
She underlined the last bit several times.
"Now let's get back to today's ACTUAL lesson. I've got forever, you lot don't. Yet."