For days I had been exploring the brakes of the Red Deer river in Alberta, Canada, for the wonderful extinct dinosaurs of the Cretaceous Period. They had only been known since 1876, when the late Professor E. D. Cope made his famous expedition to the Bad-Lands of the Upper Missouri, in the beds of the Judith River of Montana.

I was exploring the valley of the Red Deer River at Drumheller. A great chasm in fact, cut by the river and its tributaries four hundred feet deep into the Edmonton Series of the Upper Cretaceous, out of the very heart of the prairie. Across from plain to plain the distance averages about two miles. Tributary creeks and coulees have carved trenches further back into the plain; while in the main valley, especially near the brink of the prairie, are long ridges, table lands, buttes and knolls, pinnacles and towers, whose bases often impinged on the ox-bows of the river itself; down whose rugged sides a stone rolling would bring up in a sudden halt, in the waters four hundred feet below. All this region, except of course the river channel and flood plain, was transformed by nature’s sculptury into fantastic badland scenery, the rocks carved into the most intricate patterns, entirely devoid of vegetation, except, perhaps, along the northern slope of some rounded bluff, where sponge-moss had secured a precarious foothold; while running through it were trailing junipers, and spruces, with flowers of many a hue (to delight the eye) after searching the steep and barren slopes for hours. These slopes were covered with cherty fragments that rolled under the feet, threatening to hurl the adventurous Fossil Hunter into the gorge below. I had found great quantities of the bones of the huge dinosaurs, or “terrible lizards.” Among them the trachodonts or duck-billed dinosaurs, were the most common. Great swimming lizards they were, spanning thirty feet or more in length. My party had already two skeletons. One of them thirty-two feet long, we mounted afterwards in the Victoria Memorial Museum at Ottawa, Ontario. We found quarry after quarry where the bones had been piled up as flotsam by some ancient tide, that for ages had ceased to beat on this land. Today the nearest ocean is 700 miles away, and the strata have attained an altitude of twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level. The day had been hot and sultry; as I came upon a coal miners tunnel (there are unlimited beds of coal in these breaks), I found relief by going in some distance. The floor was deeply covered with fine dust, making a restful place; and it is little wonder I fell asleep; I never knew how long I slept, but when I awoke, I was overpowered with surprise, I could not tell whether I had awakened in eternity, or Time had turned back his dial, and carried me back to the old Cretaceous Ocean. At all events however, I found myself lying under a great redwood tree. Stretching before me to the south as far as the eyes could reach, a mighty ocean lay as level as a thrashers floor to the distant horizon, while to the north an interminable forest on the lowlands, interspersed with countless lagoons and bayous, the oozy margins thickly planted with rush and horse-tail, and tall swamp grass, while vast quantities of moss clogged the shore. East and west, the shore line was undulated by indentations, cut by river or bayou mouth, promontory cape and bay. The heat was excessive, and it was a relief to find shelter under one of these gigantic evergreens whose branches waved above the everglades; deep rooted in the soil, it had already endured the blasts of a thousand years. Perhaps this mighty giant had witnessed many a tidal wave leap the borders of old ocean, and plunge with resistless fury over the lowlands, uprooting trees of weaker fiber, sweeping a waste of peat and wood out to sea, to be returned in mingled masses of vegetation to clog the shore. Its last year’s cones and leaflets lay on the ground around me, and put me in mind of the locality I had discovered but yesterday, where hundreds of cones and leaflets of the giant sequoia or redwood lay deeply buried in the flinty rocks of the badlands of the Red Deer river.

Like all noble scenes of nature the mind cannot at once grasp them fully, if it ever does.

The south wind had sprung up, the tide was rising, the waves were curling as they rolled on the beach: higher and higher they came capped with white foam. As far as the eyes could reach, long lines of breakers heaped tons of water on the shore, lashed by the frowning tempest. The sublimity of the scene was heightened by the colors in the west, that flecked the horizon with bars of gold and crimson; while the sun, a globe of fire, sank to rest in old ocean. I was lying beneath the tree breathing the salted air, partly in a trance. Is this real? I asked myself. Is the wind really sighing among the branches of the trees, that sheltered me? sounding like music of an aeolian harp, the tracery of interwoven leaflets acting as if they were stretched invisible wires? Is this a dream or reality? How often in other days while searching the semi-arid fossil beds of the west, in my day dreams have I put life in the old dry bones; how often some stately dinosaur has passed before my mental vision. The forests, the rivers, the lakes and oceans of other days, have appeared as if they actually existed. Is it incredible then, that I should be transported across three million years, the distance between the living and the dead? “How fleet is a glance of the mind; compared to the speed of its flight, the lightning itself lags behind, and the swift winged arrows of light.” Yes! modern science claims that three million years have sped away since the end of the Age of Reptiles, since the Dinosaurs perished from the earth. Yet I was here. I could not doubt my own senses. I saw in the east the Queen of Night rise slowly from the bosom of old ocean, while to the west the last streak of departing day, glimmered once more and disappeared. Overhead the constellations of the temperate zone shone in undimmed splendor, as they did last night above the Albertian plains. Yes! there to the north was the Great Dipper; its pointers as of yore, still led my eyes to the North Star. Venus too, shone as the “Star of the evening, beautiful star.” Who knows but some tiger of the everglades, some huge Carniverous Dinosaur, may be prowling about for prey. A Fossil Hunter might prove a rare tidbit to him. It were better in my unprotected condition to seek a place of safety. I noticed that some of the bushes that lined the thick jungles around me had long powerful thorns, while running vines, had fibers as tough as hemp. I had my collection bag still with me, with its chisels, knives and small hand pick. So quickly cutting some long thorns and binding them to my shoes with the vines, I sought a small tree, the crown of which was hidden among the lower branches of the redwood. I climbed by forcing the thorns into the bark of the tree, around which my arms were clasped, and I ascended with the same ease that a linesman climbs a telegraph pole, driving the sharp steel spikes fastened to his boots into the wood. When I got among the lower branches of the huge tree one hundred feet above ground, I crawled down to its juncture with the trunk where I found an airy chamber, its floor covered with dried leaves. Stretching myself at full length upon this fragrant bed, I offered up my evening prayers to my Father in heaven, knowing that I was being guided by His hand. Ah! had he not led me through the wilderness for forty years in His cemeteries of Creation, among the countless creatures of His hand. My mind took me back to the many forms, I had recovered, and saved from the destroying agencies of time and the vandal hand of man. I remembered I had eighty-five distinct species of extinct life in Munich Bavaria where the late distinguished Paleontologist Dr. von Zittel had once written me that I “had erected in Munich an immemorial monument to my name.” I thought of the hundreds of species I had discovered that now helped form the great Cope Collection in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, that great storehouse of American fossil vertebrates. I thought too of my collection in the British Museum, and in the Museums of Berlin and Paris. Surely they prove that God has cared for me while I was “about my Father’s business.” I need not worry I thought, because forsooth He had carried me back to the close of the Cretaceous, that wonderful Age of Reptiles when land and air and sea were filled with, to us, strange forms of life; when great lizards shook the earth with their majestic tread, sea serpents and great bony fishes ruled the sea, while huge flying reptiles flapped their leathery wings over the deep. When I thought of all the creatures I had hunted for forty years, and dug their mouldering skeletons from an old ocean bed a thousand miles from the existing seas, from some great lake bottom, or the flood plain of an ancient river. I asked myself: Will He who brought me here leave me to suffer and to die? How often he had rescued me from sudden death. Shall I fear to lay me down to sleep alone with Him in this land never seen before by mortal eyes. Oh no! So peacefully I laid me down to rest humming Scott’s famous lines:

And so I fell asleep. No rude sounds disturbed; when the morning sun streamed in my eyes I awoke refreshed for the thrilling adventures of the day. It was spring, every living thing throbbed with life, the sap was surging through the trees arrayed in their brightest tints, the ground below was carpeted with flowers in endless variety and hue: there a clump of evergreens, and here one of poplars, while in the distance figs, magnolias and a wealth of other trees added beauty and variety to the redwood forest.

Inshore the fertile zone between low and high tide swarmed with oysters, clams and mussels. They covered every available inch of space in the caves and crannies carved out of the ledge of sandstone along the beach by the ceaseless ebb and flow of the sea, or when the waves were driven by the tempest’s lash. As I had gone without supper the night before, I felt very hungry. Rapidly descending my tree I ran to the beach and gathered handfuls of the luscious shells, dripping with salt water. With steel digger used in collecting fossils I opened enough to appease a ravenous appetite.

The jungles behind seemed impenetrable, so I walked to the edge of the bayou, which emptied into the sea nearby. It was thickly planted with moss and rushes: but for the fact that there were logs everywhere, lying at all angles in the morass I could not have gotten to the water. By teetering across the yielding moss, and resting on the half submerged logs, I reached the sullen stream. I soon concluded that I must construct a boat, in order to explore the wonderful everglades. From the log I had a fine view of the bayou that wound its way through moss and swamp grass several feet high. The bayou expanded into lakes of considerable size, bordered everywhere with the redwood forest, and other trees on the rising land. With thick underbrush and high grass beneath, I noticed the water was full of gar-pike and turtles, the latter having beautifully sculptured shells, some of them a couple of feet in diameter. Among them I noticed the beautiful Trionyx, the shell marked with lovely designs. I remembered how, when on Professor Cope’s Expedition to Montana in 1876, I was carried away with delight when I gathered from a sandstone bluff fragments of these shells belonging to the Judith River Beds of the Upper Missouri. But here were the living, breathing animals themselves; so oblivious of my presence that they crowded on the very log on which I was standing. Man’s cruelty to animals had not caused them to fear the human eye; an abundant food supply prevented viciousness. When I attempted to catch one, however, they all glided gracefully off into the water. Whole schools of gars and other fishes darted here and there in full view.

Turning back to the oyster bed, and searching along shore for a suitable piece of drift wood with which to make a boat, in the flotsam that lined the shore, I also found mingled with the driftwood and shells, moss and sea-weed, countless bones of dinosaurs, not brittle and filled with rocky material, as were those I found on Red Deer river yesterday, but bones with flesh and sinew still adhering to them, carried out as toll to the sea, from bayou or river. But the ocean soon tired of them and after playing with them until the time of high tide, returned them to the land with her own shells, seaweeds, and dead fishes, to fester in the sun.

These bones showed me they had lived but a few days before, and were perhaps the remains of the feast of some titanic carnivore. I determined to go on a hunt for them. Here were limbs of duck-bills ten feet in length, together with the strong ligaments that bound the bones together in life. Here, too, the mighty Triceratops has left a monstrous head, seven feet in length, to mingle with the drift.

The Carnivores were represented by powerful feet with three great claws, and a spur like a rooster. The feet along measured over three feet long, the horny claws measured ten inches. Crocodilian bones and those of small reptiles and fishes lay around.

But as I was determined to find a log of the right size to hew into a boat, I wandered on, searching the drift pile with eager eyes. I could not be idle, and was determined to take advantage of the opportunity offered me, to study these wonderful creatures of a far-away day. I wondered whether they would in life prove what the students of their remains in the Twentieth Century supposed. I longed to know.

At last, after much effort, I found a redwood trunk over twenty feet long with a large enough diameter to make a comfortable dug-out. Luckily it was just above high tide, near the mouth of a bayou. With my hand pick I cut off the bark and fashioned bow and stern. Fortunately I had some matches in my vest pocket, I built a fire against the huge hollow trunk of a redwood, and was careful not to let it go out entirely.

Along the shore, washed up by the tide from the sandstone ledge, were numerous iron concretions, usually round and flattened on two sides. These proved invaluable. They would get red-hot in my fire, and I used them for burning out the boat. A flake of flinty rock served as a shovel when fastened into a split stick, and two tied together at the ends made a serviceable pair of tongs. With these simple tools, my work proceeded famously. Paddles and scull, too, I made from strips of strong and pliable young poplars. With my fire kept burning, I had no trouble about food. I had always been a meat lover, and in camp a breakfast without bacon was a failure. So instead, I made turtle soup, or broiled fishes on the coals, or on sharp sticks before the fire. I found nuts, too, and fruit, especially figs, the old ripe fruit hanging among the flowers and green figs. From tough bark I made sails and put sheets over all, to keep out the damp. With ropes of the aralia vine, I fastened my dug-out to a tree. One stormy night a very high tide floated her, and the next morning I was ready for my expedition. So, all aboard, I committed myself to Him who hears “the ravens’ clamorous cry,” and drifted with the tide up the center of the bayou. With scull in hand, I guided my boat and with my eyes drank in the beauty of the scene. It was a lovely morning cool and refreshing, the air laden with the spicy fragrance of evergreens that lined the elevated bench inshore. The delicious aroma of spring flowers delighted the senses, while acres of water lilies with kidney shaped leaves and white and yellow flowers rested in graceful attitudes upon the water. Along the shore line were dense masses of moss; while serried ranks of rushes and long grass cast waving shadows athwart the sluggish stream. Behind on the solid earth the stately redwood, poplars, magnolia, figs and many other trees, cast their shadows across the bayou. These splendid forms

There they stand in solemn grandeur. Near the shore was a thick growth of underwood, while inland clear spaces were visible owing to the fact that the close crowned heads of the forest prevented the rays of the sun from passing through them to the ground below, and nothing but the humble moss and other lowly vegetation could secure a foothold. I noticed suddenly a disturbance up stream, and suspecting that a dweller of this solitude was approaching a specially seductive patch of rushes and horse-tails across the stream, I backwatered my boat into the fringe of vegetation near the eastern shore, until it was completely hidden in an ambuscade of verdure. I anchored by means of a large concretion attached to a rope, of the running vine already mentioned. Carefully crawling to the front of the boat where I had made a small deck, I stretched at full length, and parting the rushes had an uninterrupted view of the bayou. Soon, I saw the white foam ripple off the huge back and tail of a swimming reptile. A duck-bill if you please, that was rapidly approaching. The huge elongated head and short front webbed feet, the great body, and enormous swimming tail, the last as long as the entire body, made up a total length of about thirty-five feet. The tail was nearly three feet high, where it left the body, terminating in a small point over sixteen feet away. It was the main propeller that hurried him on his way to his pasture ground, in graceful and powerful undulations, aided by his paddle-like front limbs, feet and great hind limbs ten feet long. The water gurgled, and foamed, little patches of foam, were caught up by the passing breeze and carried to leeward. Soon he passed at full speed within ten feet of my shelter, and brought up a hundred feet away under the western shore. There he planted his hind feet firmly in the muddy bottom, ten feet below. The water continued its sullen flow, murmuring against the pillar-like limbs. The webbed front limbs, he used as arms to bring the rich foliage within reach of his duck-bill to be nipped off, and passed between the scissor-like teeth that sheared the food into shreds, to pass into a cavernous stomach below, and so appease a ravenous appetite.

I had a fine view of the beautiful creature. Back of the head a frill several inches high reached to the shoulders. The whole body was covered with the most beautiful patterns of scales, or rounded tubercles, arranged in mosaic-work of very pretty rosettes, of scales perhaps an eighth of an inch in diameter with small tubercles between. The morning sun reflected in the water every scale and contour of the body, limbs and out stretched tail. And so this creature of other days was before me in flesh and blood and power. Over some parts of the body there were areas of large pavement scales. They were entirely distinct, and did not overlap.

And his body broad expended
With thin skin is covered o’er,
Scaled in beauteous patterns blended
With the foliage near the shore.

The bright rosettes were more highly colored than the smaller dots. As the thin skin hung loosely on the frame below, it moved in graceful curves rounded muscles, massive hind limb, and great tail. The hind limbs terminated in three large hoofs on each foot; that spread well over half a square yard of the muddy bottom. The tail was adorned with large colored scales. He is now in his natural habitat, the Everglades along the old Cretaceous Ocean. The land was beginning slowly to rise from the domain of Neptune, who had held sway for ages, but even now, it was but slightly above sea-level, while meandering bayou, river or lake were interspersed between the lowlands. There were great accumulations of peat, and other rank vegetation covering great areas of swamp-land, to the depth of thirty feet or more. Often no doubt, a great tidal wave will flood the rising land, covering the vegetation with ocean mud, which in due time, in the ages to come, will form under pressure the coal fields of Alberta Province. We have already noted her wealth of coal.

Our trachodon has finished breakfast, and though at the time of writing these lines no one had suggested a name for him, the great question with me was how continue the study of this beautiful lizard, learn more of his life history and of the other creatures of his day. I concluded the rich everglades would abound in many of his kind, and a rich fauna too, including many other forms. As he continued to feed I continued to think. I was not surprised to see him alone, because reptiles as a rule care little for their fellows. They do not mass together in herds like mammals. Each one seems to live for himself, the stronger ones winning in the battle of life. They seem to have none of the almost human sensibilities of mammals, show little love if any for the offspring. As soon as the young are large enough for food, in the case of flesh eaters, their hungry parents may gobble them up, and they are no safer from them, than any others of the hungry tribe. The only way to escape is to keep out of the way. Of course our trachodont is, as we have already seen, herbivorous in habit; and is not likely to do battle, except in self defense, from jealousy, or over the food supply. Neither would he lead others to the feast, each one must look out for himself.

I was not surprised that this fellow was a swimmer. In 1908 my oldest son George, found a skeleton of a trachodon in the famous Beds of Converse County, Wyoming, complete except that the tail and hind feet were missing. He lay on an old drift on his back, wrapped in his skin, as in a mantle, or rather the impression of his skin, for the original substance had long ago disappeared. His head lay twisted under his left shoulder. The skin in the abdominal region had collapsed, and lay across the inside of the vertebral column, all going to prove he had died in the water, that he was filled by the expanding gases after death, that his body was lifted to the surface and floated with the current, thus forcing the head back under the shoulders. When the gas escaped, the abdominal walls fell in; the water rushed in to fill the cavity, the body became heavier than water, and sank to the bottom. There the fine sand drifted over it, and forced the yielding skin deeper into the body cavity. The decay of the contents of the viscera and the flesh occurring more rapidly than the skin, the latter was forced closer and closer to the bones until the specimen, as now mounted in the American Museum New York, shows a resemblance to a mummy. So Dr. Osborn in describing it suggested the name “Dinosaur Mummy.” Before this discovery, it was supposed that the reptile was a land animal, that he used his powerful hind limbs in connection with the tail, to form a tripod on which his powerful weight rested, while he fed off the tender foliage of tree. It was also believed that he was plated with dermal, or skin scutes, to protect him from his carniverous enemies. However as the “mummy” proves, and as the living creature proved, his skin was thin, with no dermal plates. His front feet were webbed, and his habitat the bayous and swamps along the sea-plain. I was glad, as my saurian was through breakfast to see him lift his body, head and front limbs up, and look towards shore, and beyond a few rods away, to a sheet of water that appealed to him. So wading through the morass and putting his small front feet down on the muddy slope left by the retreating tide, the narrow strip between its ebb and flow, he drew himself out of the water, and lifting his body but a few feet above the mud, he dragged his huge tail through it, leaving a well marked trail behind. His pose to me was very interesting, as I had come to the conclusion from my study of the “mummy,” that this was his natural gait, though most American Paleontologists believe, that their usual pose was standing erect on the hind limbs, the front legs used chiefly for balancing. As he reached the fringe of bushes he pushed his duck-bill through them, nosing around as if to scent some enemy. Then as the coast seemed clear, he hurries across the narrow strip, beneath the silent evergreens.

Too bad! rush as he may, he cannot escape this fierce Tiger of the Everglades. So occupied are the great dinosaurs, they do not heed my approach. Lifting anchor I pulled across the stream into the channel made by the trachodon on his way towards shore. The noble lizard seeing that he could not escape his foe, bravely faces him. As if to hurry the end, he exposes the most vulnerable part of his body, by rising on his hind limbs. The enemy hurls himself at full length upon his defenseless victim; with great claws of hardened horn, full ten inches long, he rips his body down and red blood floods the mossy way. As he falls to earth and death, this tyrant, of those early days, tears open his body, and feeds on the quivering flesh and running blood in the very shelter of the redwood forest. The awful terror of the scene kept me well out of reach in the water. I was overcome with the shock, coming so swiftly in the peaceful woods. The sun was not darkened, the perfume of flowers filled the air, the gentle breeze sighed in the branches overhead, showing that nature knows no pity, no mercy. That death is inevitable, and still nature’s beauty, her changing seasons go on for time. Even though the victim was a cold blooded reptile I had become deeply interested in it. I remembered however, that the carnivore must prey on the herbivore; that the latter increase so rapidly, the death of one of their number would leave scarcely a ripple on the reptilian life of the everglades. I had time of course to study the conqueror carefully, I saw he did not differ greatly from the one Professor Osborn described as Tyrannosaurus rex, the king of the tyrants; from a partial skeleton and magnificent head, discovered by Barnum Brown in the Hell Creek Beds of northern Montana. His huge head is four feet long, three feet wide and two feet high. The jaws armed with teeth six inches long, with serrated edges on the double cutting surfaces. A great sinewy body, very short front limbs, powerful hind ones, and long tail, with sled-like chevron bones, and extending processes interlocking the caudal vertebrae, not allowing them to move freely on themselves, as in the snakes and lizards of today. The tail was stiffened and was dragged along on the ground. The body was 40 feet long and the head reached nineteen feet above the ground. As I saw, a blow from his terrible claw-armed hind limb, tore open the trachodon, nearly his equal in bulk. After gormandising to his heart’s content, he drifted off into the forest, and I saw him no more. I then paddled in short and tying my boat to a sapling, went up to the carcass and secured great strips of the tough skin so beautifully adorned with shining and beautifully colored scales, polygonal or rounded, some so small that they appeared as mere dots, as already observed. I was delighted to see near by a pool of alkali water, in this I doused the skin and it then only took a short time to break up the glue. I found a poplar log about eight inches in diameter and after sharpening one end, I drove it into the ground over a dead log that was lying on the ground. After peeling off the bark from the ends I had a handy device, so stretching the skin over it, scaly side down, and using the edge of a chisel for a scraper, I rapidly prepared the skin for use, cleaning off the flesh and broken down glue. By the time it was dry I had tanned it, and it was as pliable as newly tanned leather. I continued my labor until I had prepared a great roll. Not of buck-skin, but trachodon skin. I saw in prospect sails, ropes paulins for my boat and myself, as a protection against the rains and for many other things. Where the skin had been torn from the dorsal spines, I saw bundles of ossified tendons, like those of a turkey’s leg. They lay across each other diagonally to the spines, while other rows were parallel. What were they for? I supposed to stiffen, and strengthen the dorsal column. Perhaps too, if our trachodon had not been so foolish as to face his enemy, and had continued the retreat, and the tiger had leaped on his back, his claws finding no foothold on account of these same bony tendons, he might have lost his footing. They extended some distance into the tail, making the forward part like an oar. The undulations we saw, were performed by the posterior part of the tail while in the act of swimming.