Ouroborosaurus

In a podunk galaxy, in a back water universe...

A hotdog doesn't stop being a hotdog when it is eaten. Only the casing changes, becoming the thing which ate the hotdog.
-Anonymous

The gas station heat lamp referred to locally as Sol buzzed gently as it cooked Henry the hot dog.  The roller on which Henry and all the other hot dogs lived and roasted was your typical compound precipitate resulting from post-nova space material after a few billion years of not being cleaned.  This one is referred to by these hot dogs as Earth.  Henry was the kind of hot dog that resulted from a chain of unchecked procreation that, for the time being, terminated at him.  Others of his ilk, specifically the ones who get together and decide on things like what they should call the lamp and what they should call the roller upon which they all roast, refer to their own breed of hotdog as Homo sapiens.  These strange naming conventions are a symptom the neurotic nature of the hot dogs from spending their lives being baked by a heat lamp and hunted by other, larger hot dogs from distant branches of their ecological tree. 

Like your typical 35-year old gas station hot dog, Henry was brown, wrinkled, and sweaty from exposure.  He was outside in the flood of radiation from Sol, bent double over a patch of rock and sand with an oversized brush in one hand.  He had been that way, it felt to him, nearly as long as the fossilized bone he was carefully extricating from the nearly identical surrounding stone.  Despite the physical torture, he was glad to be there simply for the opportunity to be a part of a paleontological dig of this size.  Earlier in the month, others like Henry had been traversing this particularly hostile part of the world for reasons of their own and had discovered remains of something of the phylum Chordata and, it was to be seen, of the superclass Tetrapoda. 

This initial discovery led to communication with others interested in this kind of thing.  Eventually the throng arrived, prepared to dig a shallow pit into the rock.  Crisscrossing this pit were lines of rope supported at the corners by short wooden posts, converting the chaotic and broken landscape into more easily managed cells.  Each of these cells was being fussed over by academicals like Henry.  The creature they were exhuming was by no means whole.  Millions of years of steady tectonic pressure, saying nothing of what actually killed the beast, is not kind to even the strongest of tissues.  But there was a certain appeal for Henry to digging up a carnivorous theropod.  

Henry had grown up hunting for helixes stone by stone along what was once ocean floor, mindlessly cracking them one by one on the off chance it held a surprise instead of more boring, bare rock.  If he had to describe the difference, he would shortly give up and say that there's just something more rewarding finding a femur or a rib or a claw.  He wiped his forehead and continued brushing at the ground.  The tedium and heat haze was starting to get to him.  The stone wavered a bit in his sight, partly due to boredom but majorly due to impending heat stroke.  He picked up his lukewarm water bottle and poured some of it on his head and in his mouth.  In this dry heat, he couldn't imagine any water actually hitting the ground.  It would evaporate the moment it lost contact with his skin.  He could already feel the cooling effect fading and his skin becoming hot and parched again.  Turning back to his brushing, a glint caught his eye.  

The chrome gleam of metal reflected at him.  Some of the water had indeed hit the ground before evaporating and had cleaned this flat shiny surface of dust.  He tried to flick the metal away with the bent bristles of the old horsehair brush.  The L shaped white metal piece was as part of the rock as the petrified bone he had been working on, like a chocolate chip in a cookie.  It had to be about as old.  It looked to Henry, whose mind was currently baked well-done, a bit like the frame of a smartwatch.