The arid desert of the Southwest seems like the last place that anyone would be searching for the most infamous criminal from the Northwest.

But that's what Tom Kaye is doing, in a manner of speaking, in his lab just north of the Mexican border.

“One of the things that's my specialty is I look at the effects of long-term burial by things living in the ground, like bacteria and how it effects things,” he said.

Kaye, who normally digs up dinosaur bones for Seattle's Burke Museum, volunteered to examine some of the tattered loot from skyjacker D.B. Cooper.

For the first time, the bills are examined under a powerful electron microscope.

 “As we zoom in the first thing that's noticeable is the fibers from the bill,” aid Kaye.

Tiny bits of never-before-seen evidence come to life.

"If you go in closer, we can see small particles attached to the bill," said Kaye.

The story of D.B. Cooper, the nation’s only unsolved skyjacking, has an important missing link.

A passenger calling himself Dan Cooper demanded parachutes and $200,000 ransom, which the FBI delivered during a Seattle fuel-stop.

Airborne again, Cooper leaped from the commercial jet with the money into the icy Northwest sky and disappeared.

Beachcombers found some of the money nine years later along the Columbia River, well south of where Cooper was believed to have landed.

How did it get there? Kaye says his research is already revealing some answers.

“We have absolutely found some things that shocked us when we first looked at those bills," he said. “It's my personal opinion that most everything we've heard from eyewitnesses and the people involved is wrong."

Drumming up new leads, from places other than dusty Cooper files in the Seattle FBI office, is exactly what Agent Larry Carr had in mind when he loaned the Cooper bills to a respected team of scientists nationwide, including Kaye.

“I think if he can take a dinosaur bone, pull it out of the ground and tell me what it had for lunch millions of years ago, well, if he can do that with a dinosaur bone, then maybe he can do something with the money we have,” said Carr.

The old case is such a low priority, Carr can't get tests done at the FBI’s busy lab, so he's appealed to the public for help, with promising results.

Wayne Walker of Alabama discovered something scores of FBI agents didn't. He noticed a basic miscalculation on the FBI’s map of the plane's flight path used to determine Cooper's drop zone.

That, and other new evidence, means the massive search in 1971 was in the wrong place. Cooper probably jumped more than 15 miles south of the search area.

Kaye's team is also uncovering evidence that Cooper landed south, but won't release specifics until research is complete.

He expects to re-write some chapters of Cooper history and spur new leads.

“So D.B. Cooper, if you're out there, we're coming to get you and our guns are really loaded with technology,” said Kaye.

The FBI plans to take the new information that citizens are uncovering and develop a new profile of the Cooper case, which will be made public some time next year.

Do have information on the D.B. Cooper case? Contact the Seattle FBI field office at fbise@leo.gov.