"You want to stick your finger in a dinosaur brain?" asked Simba Srivastava. Inside a paleobiology lab lined with cabinets of ancient fossils, the Virginia Tech undergraduate held up a rough, pitted skull. "This is a uniquely sucky specimen," said Srivastava. "It's so bad. Like, if you saw a human skull in this way, you'd throw up." Despite its poor condition, the senior geosciences major spent two years carefully reconstructing the fossil and figuring out where it fits in the evolutionary history of dinosaurs. His work, published in Papers in Palaeontology , offers new insight into how dinosaurs rose to dominance during the Jurassic period. Although this kind of research is typically handled by experienced scientists, geobiologists Sterling Nesbitt and Michelle Stocker brought Srivastava onto the project as a first-year student. "We want undergraduate researchers to experience the whole paleontological research process at Virginia Tech," said Nesbitt.…