William R. Downs, Ⅲ, known as Dong Weilin to many friends, died a relatively young man ( 1950 ～ 2002) at the height of his career in paleontology.His career began at the Museum of Northern Arizona in 1975. One of his early tasks was the preparation of Triassic cynodonts from Antarctica for Edwin H.Colbert, then Curator Emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Museum of Northern Arizona (Colbert and Kitching, 1977). Will prepared the Early Jurassic armored ornithischian Scutellosaurus for Colbert (1981), and he collected and prepared a skull of Pentaceratops from the Cretaceous of the San Juan Basin (Rowe et al., 1981 ).One of his early ventures into screen-washing was near the Pentaceratops site in the San Juan Basin (Flynn, 1986) where mammals were poorly represented. In the mid-1980' s, Will left the Museum of Northern Arizona to become affiliated with Northern Arizona University, also in Flagstaff. In addition, he was briefly employed to revamp the fossil preparation laboratories at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, during which time he joined in excavations of a large series of small primitive ornithopods in Texas (Winkler et al.,1988). He maintained an office at the Bilby Research Center, and then the Department of Geology,at Northern Arizona University until the time of his death.