Mystery at the Museum

Today our class is going to the museum. My backpack is stuffed with dinosaur books. When we walk in, a stegosaurus skeleton towers over us. 

“Eli, look!” my friend Ruby says. 

“So awesome,” I say. 

A man is standing next to the stegosaurus. He’s wearing a green suit. He’s eating a doughnut with rainbow sprinkles. 

“I’m Professor Rex,” he says. He points to the skeleton. “Behold, a stegosaurus skeleton. Very rare. Not common. Also very valuable. It’s worth a lot of money!” 

I flip to a page about stegosauruses in one of my books. It says that stegosauruses had three toes on their back feet and five on their front feet. I count the toes on the skeleton’s front feet. There are only three. I raise my hand. 

“Are some of the bones in the front feet missing?” I say. 

“How silly! This is a complete skeleton,” Professor Rex says. 

I keep looking at the stegosaurus’s toes and then at my book. I can tell that something is wrong with this skeleton.

After the field trip, I tell Ruby about the missing toes. We decide to go back to the museum to look for clues. We walk down a hall. Ruby stops. 

“Look! Muddy pawprints! Maybe a dog took the bones,” she says. 

We follow the pawprints. They lead us to the museum security office. I peek around the side of the door. I see a woman wearing a security guard uniform. I see a dog beside her. The dog’s paws are the same size as the pawprints we followed, and they are muddy. We knock on the office door. 

“Can I help you? I’m Mindy the security guard. That’s my dog, Pickles, over there. I bring him to work,” she says. 

“Is there any chance Pickles took some dinosaur bones from the museum? We think some bones are missing,” I say. 

“I knew it!” Mindy says. “Pickles here didn’t take them, but someone did. For the past six months, bones have been disappearing and then reappearing. Something weird is happening.” 

“We agree,” I say. 

Just then, Pickles starts barking. He’s found a sandwich in the garbage. 

“If there’s food around, Pickles will find it,” Mindy says, laughing. “I have to get back to work, but good luck!”

We look for more clues around the museum, but we can’t find any. Then we decide to visit my mom. She works at an art store. 

We walk into the art store and say hi to my mom. Then I see a familiar shade of green. I’ve seen it before. It’s Professor Rex! He’s chomping on a doughnut with sprinkles and holding a big block of clay. He walks toward the cash register. 

“The professor is one of my best customers,” my mom tells us. “Ever since he moved to town six months ago, he’s been buying a lot of clay.” 

“Yes, uh . . . I love making clay pots,” Professor Rex says. 

He buys the clay, then scampers out of the store. He moves quickly and lightly. Ruby and I run after him, but soon we can’t see him. 

“Look!” Ruby says. There’s a trail of rainbow sprinkles on the road. We follow the sprinkles. 

The sprinkles lead us back to the museum. They go past the stegosaurus skeleton, down a staircase and . . . then the trail stops. We hear footsteps on the stairs below us. 

“Who’s there?” Ruby asks. A man walks up the stairs. 

“I’m Doug, the janitor,” the man says. “Someone keeps making a mess with these sprinkles. I’m mopping them up. You’d think this was a bakery, not a museum.” 

“Do you remember where the trail of sprinkles was going? We were following it to try to find some missing bones,” I say. 

“I don’t remember,” Doug says. 

“What do we do now?” Ruby asks. 

I have an idea. “Pickles!” I say. “He can sniff out food anywhere!” 

Ruby, Doug, and I run to the security office. We tell Mindy what happened. Then Mindy, Pickles, Doug, Ruby, and I run back to the stairs where the trail of sprinkles stopped. Pickles starts sniffing. We follow him down a hallway. 

He leads us into a dark room. In the corner, I see a glowing computer on a desk. The screen says, “For sale: stegosaurus skeleton.” 

Next to the computer is something huge covered in a sheet. I pull off the sheet. Under it is a stegosaurus skeleton! 

There are three toes on the back feet and five toes on the front feet, just like the book said. 

“This is the real skeleton! The one upstairs is fake. It’s phony! Someone has been replacing the real bones with fake ones made of clay so they can sell the real skeleton. But they made a mistake when they made the fake bones. They didn’t put the right number of toes on the front feet,” I say. Everyone gasps. 

“Who was it?” Mindy says. Pickles sniffs at some sprinkles by the skeleton. Professor Rex pokes his head out from under the desk.

“It was him!” I shout. 

“You annoying kids! If you hadn’t snooped around, I would have been rich!” Professor Rex says. 

“Come with me, Professor Rex,” Mindy says. We walk to the office of the museum director. I tell her everything.

“You are fired!” she says to Professor Rex. Then she looks at me and Ruby.

“How can I ever repay you and thank you?” she says. 

“Well, aren’t you going to need a new tour guide now that Professor Rex is gone? Maybe Ruby and I could do it?” I say. 

“You clearly know a lot about dinosaurs. You’re hired!” the museum director says. 

“Awesome!” Ruby and I say together.