I spent the winter of 1875 and ’76 as a student at the Kansas State Agricultural College.

Here a party was gathered to explore western Kansas for fossils, under the leadership of Professor B. F. Mudge, the enthusiastic state geologist and a popular professor of the college. The expedition was to be made under the auspices of Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale College, whose efforts have secured for that institution the largest collection perhaps in the world of American fossil vertebrates.

I made every effort in my power to secure a place in the party, but failed, as it was full when I applied. It has always been hard, however, for me to give up what I have determined to accomplish; so, although almost with despair, I turned for help to Professor E. D. Cope, of Philadelphia, who was becoming so well known that a report of his fame had reached me at Manhattan.

I put my soul into the letter I wrote him, for this was my last chance. I told him of my love for science, and of my earnest longing to enter the chalk of western Kansas and make a collection of its wonderful fossils, no matter what it might cost me in discomfort and danger. I said, however, that I was too poor to go at my own expense, and asked him to send me three hundred dollars to buy a team of ponies, a wagon, and a camp outfit, and to hire a cook and driver. I sent no recommendations from well-known men as to my honesty or executive ability, mentioning only my work in the Dakota Group.

I was in a terrible state of suspense when I had despatched the letter, but, fortunately, the Professor responded promptly, and when I opened the envelope, a draft for three hundred dollars fell at my feet. The note which accompanied it said: “I like the style of your letter. Enclose draft. Go to work,” or words to the same effect.

That letter bound me to Cope for four long years, and enabled me to endure immeasurable hardships and privations in the barren fossil fields of the West; and it has always been one of the joys of my life to have known intimately in field and shop the greatest naturalist America has produced.

As soon as the frost was out of the ground, having secured a team of ponies and a boy to drive them, I left Manhattan and drove out to Buffalo Park, where one of my brothers was the agent. The only house, beside the small station building, was that occupied by the section men. Great piles of buffalo bones along the railroad at every station testified to the countless numbers of the animals slain by the white man in his craze for pleasure and money. A buffalo hide was worth at that time about a dollar and a quarter.

Here at Buffalo I had my headquarters for many years. A great windmill and a well of pure water, a hundred and twenty feet deep, made it a Mecca for us fossil hunters after two weeks of strong alkali water. At this well Professor Mudge’s party and my own used to meet in peace after our fierce rivalry in the field as collectors for our respective paleontologists, Marsh and Cope.

What vivid memories I have of that first expedition!—memories of countless hardships and splendid results. I explored all the exposures of chalk from the mouth of Hackberry Creek, in the eastern part of Gove County, to Fort Wallace, on the south fork of the Smoky Hill, a distance of a hundred miles, as well as the region along the north and south forks of the Soloman River.

When we left Buffalo Station, we left civilization behind us. We made our own wagon trails, two of which especially were afterwards used by the settlers until the section lines were constructed. One of them ran directly south, crossing Hackberry Creek about fifteen miles from the railroad, at a point where there was a spring of pure water—a rare and valuable find in that region. We camped here many times, and made such a good trail that it was used for years. Our second trail extended across the country, striking Hackberry Creek where Gove City now stands, and led over Plum Creek Divide, whose high ledges of yellow chalk served us as a landmark for twenty miles. From this point we could see Monument Rocks, and near them the remains of an old one-company post on the Santa Fé Trail. Our trail then led up the Smoky Hill to the mouth of Beaver Creek, on the eastern edge of Logan County, and followed the old road as far west as Wallace.

Prairie-dog villages extended west along all the water courses, and open prairies to the state line, and we were rarely out of sight of herds of antelope and wild horses. Near the present site of Gove City, on the south side of Hackberry Creek, there is a long ravine with perpendicular banks ten feet or more in height. This ravine was at that time used as a natural corral by some men who made a business of capturing these wild ponies by following them night and day, keeping them away from their watering places, and giving them no chance to graze, until they were exhausted. They were then easily driven into the ravine and roped; after which they were picketed on the prairie and soon became tame. These wild horses were swift travelers, and the most graceful of all the wild animals of the West, being distinguished for the beauty of their flowing manes and tails.

There was constant danger from Indians, and in order that we might escape as much as possible the eagle eye of some scout who might be passing through the country, our tent and wagon-sheet were of brown duck. This blended with the dry, brown buffalo grass, as we traveled from canyon to canyon, and could not be distinguished very far even by the trained eye of an Indian.

I never carried my rifle with me. I left it in camp or in the wagon, for I soon decided that I could not hunt Indians and fossils at the same time, and I was there for fossils.

I had no unpleasant experiences with Indians, however, although I came very near it once. It was one day late in June, when we were about three miles north of Monument Rocks. A gentle rain early in the morning had taken the glare from the chalk cliffs, and as this is a circumstance favorable to the discovery of fossils, I shouldered my pick and started down the canyon, eagerly scanning the rocks on either side.

About a mile below camp I was startled to come upon a pony trail, so deeply cut into the soft chalk that I knew each horse must be carrying a burden. It had been made within the hour, and as I was anxious to find out what it meant, I took the back trail to the river. There I found that a large band of warriors had sought shelter from the rain in a willow thicket, tying bunches of the twigs together and throwing deer or antelope skins over them to shed the water. They had squatted within these shelters until the storm had passed, and then cooked their breakfasts, as the live coals in many of the ash heaps testified.

There were no squaws or children along; it makes no difference whether women are white or red, they always lose some of their belongings wherever they go, and there was none of such property at this camp. The ponies had been tied to the bushes and not allowed to graze, showing that the party had not expected to camp here, but had simply taken shelter from the rain to avoid the discomfort of traveling with wet buckskin moccasins and leggings. I learned later that it was a large band of Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, under their famous chief, Crazy Horse, going north to join commands with Sitting Bull, in Montana.

The chalk beds which were the field of my labors once composed the floor of the old Cretaceous ocean, and consist almost entirely of the remains of microscopic organisms, which must have fairly swarmed in the water. They were discovered by the late Dr. Bunn, of Lawrence, while a student in the laboratories of the Kansas State University, after Dana and others had said there was no chalk in America.

When the animals that inhabited this ocean died or were killed, their carcasses, buoyed up by the gases that formed after death, floated about on the surface of the water, losing a limb here, a head there, a trunk or tail somewhere else. These detached fragments, sinking to the bottom, were covered by the soft ooze of the ocean floor, and remained there as fossils, while the sedimentary rock was being lifted three thousand feet above sea level.

My explorations began on Hackberry Creek, where I went over every inch of the exposed chalk, from the creek’s mouth to its head, in Logan County. Then I searched the river and the ravines that cut into its drainage area along the flanks of the divides.

Perhaps a description of a typical day’s experience in one of the long ravines that gash the southern slope of the country may be of interest to my readers.

Human beings, in order to accomplish any result of moment, must be reasonably comfortable, that is, they must not be over-hungry or thirsty or sleepy. If they are, their minds will dwell upon their discomforts, and they will accomplish little, as the hungry boy, who keeps turning his head in the direction of the sun and wondering whether it is not almost dinner-time, is not likely to hoe much corn. My first step, therefore, must be to find water and pitch a camp.

But often I have no idea where water is to be found, and must give as much care to the search as if I were looking for fossils. So while the driver follows me with the wagon, I hunt for water and fossils at the same time.

Both sides of my ravine are bordered with cream-colored, or yellow, chalk, with blue below. Sometimes for hundreds of feet the rock is entirely denuded and cut into lateral ravines, ridges, and mounds, or beautifully sculptured into tower and obelisk. Sometimes it takes on the semblance of a ruined city, with walls of tottering masonry, and only a near approach can convince the eye that this is only another example of that mimicry in which nature so frequently indulges.

The chalk beds are entirely bare of vegetation, with the exception of a desert shrub that “finds a foothold in the rifted rock” and sends its roots down every crevice. This shrub is one of the fossil hunter’s worst enemies. Sending its roots down the clefts in the rock, it searches out the fossil bones that have been preserved there, and feasts upon them until they have been entirely consumed, thus thriving at the expense of God’s buried dead. More fine fossil vertebrates have been destroyed by this plant than by the denudation of the rock, or the vandal hand of man, although both of the latter have been powerful factors in the destruction of fossils. In those days, however, there were no curiosity hunters to dig up the precious relics, so that they were more abundant than they are now.

All this time I am wandering along the canyon in search of water. Sometimes I come upon gorges only two feet wide and fifty feet deep; sometimes for five miles or more the sides of the ravine will be only a few feet high.

I know that there is water at the river, but it is so far away from my work that I go on and on in the hope of finding some nearer at hand. Dinnertime comes, and the day is so hot that perspiration flows from every pore. A howling south wind rises and fills our eyes with clouds of pure lime dust, inflaming them almost beyond human endurance. Still no water. The driver, with horses famishing for it, makes frantic gestures to me to hurry. To ease my parched lips and swelling tongue, I roll a pebble around in my mouth, or, if the season is propitious, allay my thirst with the acid juice of a red berry that grows in the ravines.

After hours of search, I find in moist ground the borings of crawfishes; with line and sinker I measure the depth to water a couple of feet below in these miniature wells. The welcome signal is given to Will, the driver, and he digs a well, so that both man and beast may be supplied.

If I could sum up all the sufferings I endured in the chalk fossil fields, I should say that I suffered more from the lack of good drinking water than from all the other ills combined. Except when we were in the vicinity of one of the half-dozen springs that are scattered about over an expanse of country a hundred miles long and forty wide, the only water that we had to drink was alkali water, which has the same effect upon the body as a solution of Epsom salts, constantly weakening the system. Yet whole neighborhoods of settlers to this day have no other water for themselves or their beasts, and they show the deteriorating effects in their faces and their walk.

If I have found, scattered along a wash, the bones of some fossil fish or reptile, as soon as we have pitched camp and eaten our meal of antelope meat, hot biscuits, and coffee, we both return with pick and shovel, and, carefully saving each weathered fragment, trace the remains to where the rest of the bones lie in situ, as the scientists say,—that is, in their original position in their rocky sepulcher.

Then comes the work in the hot sun, whose rays are reflected with added fervor from the glaring surface of the chalk. Every blow of the pick loosens a cloud of chalk dust, which is carried by the wind into our eyes. But we labor on with unfailing enthusiasm until we have laid bare a floor space upon which I can stretch myself out at full length. Lying there on the blistering chalk in the burning sun, and working carefully and patiently with brush and awl, I uncover enough of the bones so that I can tell what I have found, and so that when I cut out the rock which holds them I shall not cut into the bones themselves.

After they have been traced, if they lie in good, hard rock, a ditch is cut around them, and by repeated blows of the pick, the slab which contains them is loosened.

This is then securely wrapped and strengthened with plaster or with burlap bandages that have been dipped in plaster of the consistency of cream. In the case of large specimens, boards are put lengthwise to assist in strengthening the material, so that it will bear transportation. Later I hope to tell of a method, originated by me, by which the most delicate fossil, even if preserved in very loose, friable rock, may be detached and transported safely.

So, as a hunter will follow the deer, through thickets and over rocks, forgetting hunger and cold and thirst in his anxiety to get a glimpse of his game, that he may add its antlers to his list of trophies, we fossil hunters, Professor Mudge’s party and my own, sought our prey over miles and miles of barren chalk beds, cheerfully enduring countless discomforts.

Urged on by enthusiasm and the desire to secure finer and finer material, I went over every inch of the acres of exposed chalk along these ravines and creeks, hoping each moment to find stretched before my delighted eyes a complete skeleton of one of those old sea serpents described by Cope, or a specimen of that wonderful Pteranodon, or toothless flying reptile, whose wing expanse was twenty feet or more.

All day, from the first streak of light until the last level ray forced me to leave the work, I toiled on, forgetting the heat and the miserable thirst and the alkali water, forgetting everything but the one great object of my life—to secure from the crumbling strata of this old ocean bed the fossil remains of the fauna of Cretaceous Times.

The incessant labor, however, had a weakening effect upon my system so that I fell a victim to malaria, and when a violent attack of shaking ague came on, I felt as if fate were indeed against me.

I remember how, one day, when I was in the midst of a shaking fit, I found a beautiful specimen of a Kansas mosasaur. Clidastes tortor Cope named it, because an additional set of articulations in the backbone enabled it to coil. Its head lay in the center, with the column around it, and the four paddles stretched out on either side. It was covered by only a few inches of disintegrated chalk.

Forgetting my sickness, I shouted to the surrounding wilderness, “Thank God! Thank God!” And I did well to thank the Creator, as I slowly brushed away the powdered chalk and revealed the beauties of this reptile of the Age of Reptiles. Its snake-like tail and flexible movements caused it to appear to Cope a veritable serpent, so that he put it in his new sub-order Pythonomorpha.

I well remember the terrible journey over the rough sod to the station with this specimen. I was seized with another attack of ague, and as I jolted about in the bottom of the wagon, I thought that my head would surely burst. Little I cared, though, so that I got my beloved fossil to the Professor.

And I felt amply repaid for my sufferings when the next winter I laid out the skeleton on the platform of St. George’s Hall, in Philadelphia, where the Professor spoke for an hour to a spellbound audience, unfolding to them the wonders of the creatures that lived when this old world was young. At the close, which came suddenly, as was usually the case in Cope’s speeches, before the people had had time to come back from the misty past, he turned to where I was sitting on a step, and beckoned me to him. When I got within reach, he turned me around to the audience and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you Mr. Sternberg, the man who found this beautiful example of the fauna of the Cretaceous.”

He was much pleased with the hearty applause that greeted me.

This incident illustrates one of the characteristics of Cope which endeared him to all his collectors. He did not think that the money he paid them paid for the dangers and privations they endured, far from their friends and the comforts of civilization. On the contrary, he gave them credit in all his publications for their discoveries of species new to science. And this is the one essential thing to the collector—at least the true collector who values his labor as something that cannot be measured by money. All work done for science has a value above that of money. Lesquereux might have made money if he had remained a watchmaker, and Cope would have won a fortune as a ship-owner if he had entered his father’s office, but both men realized that there is work which offers higher rewards than riches; they gave their lives to science, and they will never be forgotten.

But we are far afield; let us return to the plains and canyons of the Kansas chalk beds.

I recall many trying experiences during that memorable first season. Often we got into barren ground and walked over miles and miles of blistering chalk with nothing to show for our trouble. In one locality the remains might be very abundant, while in another, perhaps just as promising in appearance, thousands of acres would be entirely barren. But we had to go over it all before we could be sure that there was nothing to repay our toil.

Once after two weeks of fruitless effort, we drove into a deep canyon, cut into the upper or reddish chalks near Monument Rocks, which are so much richer in fossils than the yellow or whitish beds farther east.

I had barely pitched the tent and got among the beds when I discovered not only that I was the first collector to visit the canyon but that it was rich in fossil remains. I found two specimens of Platecarpus, a species of Kansas mosasaur, in a low knoll, separated by but three feet of chalk.

At the same time one of those uncomfortable cold rains set in, and I was not much encouraged when Will told me that we had no food left. There was plenty of corn for the ponies, but no coffee, flour, bacon, or canned goods, not even an antelope; and we were forty miles from our base of supplies. I would not leave, however, without my load of fossils, as I feared that during my absence my rivals would come upon this Eldorado and clean it out. So the cook was told to parch a kettleful of corn, and we made our meals on that. In fact, we filled our pockets with it and lived on it for three days, eating most of the time to keep ourselves sufficiently nourished.

We had always depended for fuel upon the buffalo chips which even then were strewn about everywhere, but fortunately we found here an old dead cottonwood tree, a rare thing in that region, where even the willows on the river banks are short and stunted. But for this wood we should have suffered.

We remained there until we had loaded our wagon with eight hundred pounds of fossil vertebrates.

During the summer my constant use of a large butcher knife in cutting away the chalk from specimens caused a felon to form in the palm of my hand. A fistula resulted, and for ten days I slept but little, and could not work in the field.

Finally, worn out by hard labor and constant attacks of ague, I felt that my strength was failing, and called on Professor Cope for an assistant. He sent me J. C. Isaac, from Illges Ranch, Wyoming; but matters were not much improved, for Mr. Isaac had but a short time before seen five of his companions shot down and scalped by a band of marauding Indians, and only the swiftness of his horse had saved him from the same fate. Consequently, he saw an Indian behind every bush; and, although I had never been afraid before even when I learned that a large party on the warpath had passed close to my camp, now, worn and tired as I was, I became infected with his fears.

When I found that I could do nothing to get myself out of this mental condition and be of further use to the Professor, I wrote to him, and was ordered home for rest, to meet him later in Omaha, in company with Mr. Isaac.

But before we return to civilization, will my readers go with me on another expedition to these Kansas chalk beds? “How fleet is a glance of the mind!” Instead of an arid, treeless plain, covered with short grass, a great semi-tropical ocean lies at our feet. Everywhere along the shores and estuaries are great forests of magnolia, birch, sassafras, and fig, while a vast expanse of blue water stretches southward.

“But,” you ask, “what is that animal at full length upon the water in that sheltered cove?”

Watch it a moment! It raises a long conical head, four feet in length and set firmly upon a neck of seven strongly spined vertebræ. This powerful head terminates in a long, bony rostrum, also conical in shape. Back of the neck are twenty-three large dorsal vertebræ, followed by six pygals, as Dr. Williston calls them, to which the hind arches and paddles are attached. The body terminates in an eel-like tail of over eighty elements, each strengthened by a dorsal spine above and a V-shaped bone, called a chevron, below; so that a vertical section of the lizard would have a diamond shape.

But see! an enemy in the distance is attracting our reptile’s attention. It sets its four powerful paddles in motion, and unrolling its forked tongue from beneath its windpipe, throws it forward with a threatening hiss, the only note of defiance it can raise. The flexible body and long eel-like tail set up their serpentine motion, and the vast mass of animal life, over thirty feet in length, rushes forward with ever-increasing speed through water that foams away on either side and gurgles in a long wake behind.

The great creature strikes its opponent with the impact of a racing yacht and piercing heart and lungs with its powerful ram, leaves a bleeding wreck upon the water. Then raising its head and fore paddles into the air, it bids defiance to the whole brute creation, of which it is monarch.

A noble specimen of this great ram-nosed Tylosaur is now mounted as a panel on the wall of the American Museum, in New York, at the head of the stairs on the right (Fig. 8); and a little further on, is a splendid skull of the same species, which I discovered on Butte Creek, in Logan County. Fig. 9 shows a restoration of this species.

Doubtless many of the ankylosed bones which we fossil hunters often find in the chalk of the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous were broken by blows from these ram-nosed lizards.

We have in Kansas three genera of these mosasaurs as the celebrated Frenchman, Cuvier, named them in 1808. The word literally means a reptile of the Meuse, and it was given them because the first specimen ever found was taken from the quarries under the city of Maestricht, on the River Meuse. For this information, and for much more as to the anatomy of the Kansas mosasaurs, I am indebted to Dr. Williston’s splendid work in Volume IV of the University Geological Survey of Kansas: Paleontology, Part I; although, of course, I obtained most of my knowledge from the hundreds of specimens which I collected myself.

Among these are four especially fine specimens, nearly complete, of the flat-wristed Platecarpus coryphæus Cope. One of them I sent to the Iowa State University, with head, column, and limbs nearly in position, and still bedded in their native chalk. This fellow, who was over eighteen feet long, must have sunk so deep in the slimy mud of the ocean-bed that even the gases formed in his stomach could not lift his body to the surface. A second specimen was sent to the British Museum of Natural History, in London; a third to Munich, Bavaria, and a fourth to the Roemer Museum, in Hildesheim, Germany.

This last specimen is the best I ever took from the Kansas chalk until 1907. It is twenty-five feet long. Unfortunately, the head was all washed away, with the exception of the mandibles and a few bones of the skull. The most remarkable feature of this specimen was the presence, for the first time in my experience, of the complete cartilaginous breastbone with the cartilaginous ribs, which are very rare. They were described for the first time from the noble Bourne specimen, by Dr. H. F. Osborn, of the American Museum.

This mosasaur, Platecarpus, is the most common species known, and is almost as large as the big Tylosaurus. It differs from the latter, however, in the shape of the short, strong paddles and the blunt rostrum. The skull in the illustration (Fig. 10) is that of a very fine specimen, one of my discoveries, which was mounted by Mr. Bunker, of the natural history department in the Kansas State University. I have never seen a more complete skull, or one that shows the height so well, in any specimen, unless it is the little Clidastes velox, in the Kansas University collection. You will notice the triangular shape of the head, with the strong bones arching back to support the lower jaw by the pulley-like quadrate bone. Notice also that the suspensorium, instead of curving down so that its groove fits over the rounded edge of the quadrate, is straightened out. This is caused by its having been flattened and distorted, as nearly all fossils are, by the immense pressure to which it has been subjected. Observe the conical shape of the head in front of the eye-rim, terminating in the hard, blunt rostrum. It is believed by the authorities that a blow from this ram, delivered at full speed, would put an adversary out of commission.

But how did this creature feed itself, when all its teeth are for grasping, none for masticating? And how did it hold its prey, when it has no claw-armed fingers, only weak paddles for swimming?

In answering these questions, we shall describe two characteristics of the mosasaurs which differentiate them from all other reptiles.

If you will look closely at the photograph, you will notice, within the head, and below the eye-socket, a row of recurved teeth. These are the teeth on the pterygoid bones, which are located on either side of the roof of the mouth, near the gullet, and are provided with twelve teeth, more or less. The lower jaw with its powerful sweep on its fulcrum, pressed the living prey firmly upon these teeth so that it could not come forward and escape. Then notice the ball-and-socket joint just back of the tooth-bearing bone or dentary, of the lower jaw. After the wriggling, struggling prey had been fastened on the teeth in the roof of the mouth, the mandibles were shortened by a spreading of this central joint, and the victim was forcibly pushed down the throat.

The species Clidastes velox of these Kansas mosasaurs, was, as its name indicates, very agile, with beautiful bones of so firm a texture that they have suffered less than any of the other fossil vertebrates from the vast pressure to which they have been subjected, not only from the enormous amount of material that has been heaped above them, but from the still more powerful upward push which has raised their burial-place three thousand feet above sea level.

I sent one very beautiful specimen of Clidastes to Vassar College; so complete, in fact, that it can be made into a panel mount.

I think no artist has more fully appreciated what these great reptiles must have been when alive than Mr. Sidney Prentice, now of the Carnegie Museum, whose beautiful restoration, made to illustrate Dr. Williston’s work on Kansas Mosasaurs, is here reproduced (Fig. 11b). I am under obligations to him for the labor of his pencil. He has certainly put life into this denizen of the old Cretaceous ocean, and I do not believe that anyone, after a careful study of the skeleton, could find any fault with the restoration, from a scientific standpoint.

In this connection, I should like also to call attention to the beautifully preserved skull I sent to the Carnegie Museum. This specimen shows a complete side view of the head, with mandibles and maxilla, the teeth interlacing as perfectly as in life. The sclerotic plates that protect the eyeball are also in natural position.

The luxuriant life of the Cretaceous ocean was certainly remarkable. Fish swarmed everywhere, and often, as the specimens are uncovered, the scales are picked up by the wind, crumbled into dust, and scattered in every direction.

Among the most common of the fossil bones in those early days were those of a huge fish, whose vertebræ, with fragments of heads and jaws, were found in great abundance, although no perfect specimen has been discovered. Professor Cope, who described this fish, called it Portheus molossus. I secured a fine specimen on Robinson’s ranch, in Logan County. It lay in a small exposure of chalk along a grassy hill slope, within a stone’s throw of the ranch buildings. My son George was my assistant then, and we got out this specimen in the month of November. Our boarding place was five miles away, and every night the ground froze hard. Nothing daunted, we went to work with a will.

The head and trunk region had already been uncovered, and many of the ribs and spines had been swept away and lost. We took up the head and front fins in a great slab of plaster, as the chalk in which they lay had disintegrated under the influence of the frost. A violent windstorm was raging at the time, and to complete the slab, George had to bring water from a tank a hundred yards away. I can still see that boy running up with his pail of water, trying to carry it so that it would not be emptied by the raging, howling wind that was almost tearing his coat from his back, while I stood and shouted, “Hurry up! The plaster’s hardening!”

The rest of the column, to the tail, we took up separately, and as the great tail-fins and many of the caudal vertebræ were present with their spines, embedded in solid chalk, we removed five feet of superincumbent rock, cut a trench around the slab containing the bones, and took it up by digging under it.

This made another huge mass to be handled. The section containing the head weighed over six hundred pounds, and this tail section almost as much. The latter froze solid before we could get it up to the tent, where we kept a fire burning to dry out the water from the bones and thus prevent the injurious effects of freezing. I should like just here to express my gratitude to those ranchmen who gave their time and strength to assist me in handling these huge sections.

When they had been packed with excelsior in strong boxes, a wagon was backed up against the level platform which we had made in throwing out the rock and soil that lay over the specimen. The boxes were then set on edge, and, with the help of boards and rollers, loaded into the wagon for shipment to the railroad thirty miles away.

But my troubles with this specimen were not over; on the contrary, they had just begun. When the section containing the head was being raised on to a table in my shop it fell and its weight was so great that the head was badly shattered, as was the plaster that secured the bones in place below.

Then all through the winter, while I was trying to dry out the specimen, so that it could be cleaned and prepared for shipment, the rats, which inhabited the walls of the laboratory in great numbers, kept pulling out the bran and excelsior that had been put around the delicate bones to protect them; thus causing the broken plaster, with the bones of the head, to sink lower and lower, as the packing was carried away from underneath.

Driven to think out some plan of saving the specimen from destruction, I conceived the idea of shoving a number of wooden pegs of various lengths under the broken fragments, so as to push them up into their places and hold them firmly there. All the excelsior was then taken away from beneath them, a frame of lumber made around the section, and the whole space filled with plaster which held all the broken bones in place.

In this specimen I found for the first time a complete column of eighty-five vertebræ, a very important find, as these vertebræ are of so nearly the same size that in restoring an incomplete specimen there was no way of estimating how many of them there ought to be, and for anything to the contrary, one might go on adding them indefinitely, as a certain man in Europe added an enormous number to his mounted specimen of a Zeuglodon.

This now famous specimen is mounted above the Bourne Tylosaur, in the corridor of the Halls of Paleontology, at the American Museum. Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, in his report describing it, says: “The noble specimen of which a preliminary description is here given, adds another to the many services which Mr. Charles H. Sternberg has rendered to vertebrate paleontology. It was secured by him in the year 1900, near Elkader, Logan County, Kansas. Originally the specimen had been probably complete, but portions of the skeleton, especially the ribs and spines, were injured and partly removed by previous explorers. The fish was purchased by the Museum in 1901, and mounted and partly restored, under the direction of the writer, by Adam Hermann, with the able assistance of Mr. A. E. Anderson. Total length, from tip of tail to a point directly above premaxillaries, 15 feet, 8 inches. Length of skull, 2 feet, 2 inches. Spread of tail, 3 feet, 9 inches.” (Fig. 12.)

At the time it was mounted, this great predaceous fish of the Cretaceous was said to be the most striking example of a fossil fish in any museum of the world. Since that day, however, a still finer one has been sent to the Carnegie Museum. This specimen is much superior to that at the American Museum, as the ribs, spines, pelvic fins, arches, and anal fin are in position.

I should certainly be guilty of a great injustice to my friend and the friend of paleontology, Mr. W. O. Bourne, of Scott City, whose name has already appeared in these pages in connection with the great Tylosaur in the American Museum, if I did not give him due credit for his share in the securing of this specimen. He discovered the splendid fish and tumbled a small mountain over on top of it to hide it. Then he kindly gave it to me, and after much digging, my son was able to get trace of it. Mr. Bourne showed his wisdom in thus covering it up, not only from the elements, but also from man, who, out of curiosity, has destroyed some splendid examples of creative power. I shall mention one or two as object lessons before I complete this history.

But let us put life into this fish, whose bones now lie in the Carnegie Museum.

We are back again where the two mosasaurs did battle royal for our enjoyment. Watch that ripple! It is caused by a shoal of mackerel scurrying in toward shallow water, in a mighty column five feet deep. They are flying for their lives, for they have seen behind them their most terrible enemy, a monster fish with a muzzle like a bulldog’s, and huge fangs three inches long projecting from its mouth. Two rows of horrid teeth, one above and one below, complete its armature. The great jaws, fourteen inches long and four deep, move on a fulcrum, and when they have dropped to seize a multitude of these little fish, they close with a vise-like power. The crushed and mangled remains pass down a cavernous throat to appease a voracious appetite.

The powerful front fins are armed with an outer ray that moves on a joint in the pectoral arch, a long recurved piece of solid bone, enameled on the outer side and more powerful as a weapon than a cavalryman’s sword. This single-edged sword is three feet long, and commands the respect of its owner’s enemies, the great saurians, or Kansas mosasaurs. Our fish has only to swim up close to the abdomen of a sleeping reptile, and lay it open for several feet with one sudden stroke. If that is not sufficient, a slap of the powerful tail, with a span of nearly four feet, finishes the work.

But see! nearer and nearer the great fish comes, mouthful after mouthful of the fishes falling into its horrid jaws. It must be starving; so eager is it for its prey that it seems unconscious of the fact that the tide has turned and is moving outward. Now it discovers its danger and turns, but too late. The water has gone back to the deep, leaving it struggling for breath in a shallow pool. It thrashes wildly about with its tail, whose sticky secretions help to envelop it more and more thickly with mud and slime, until at last its struggles cease.

And then the scene changes. The old ocean disappears, and we stand, George and I, three thousand feet above sea level, on Hay Creek, in Logan County, among crumbling ruins of denuded and eroded chalk; and working with pick and shovel in the burning sun, we bring the mighty carcass once more to the light of day.

But I hope to take my readers into this field again, and will pass on now to my expedition in the Bad Lands with Professor Cope.