When I wrote the preface to “The Life of a Fossil Hunter,” I little thought of the wonderful discoveries and remarkable changes that awaited me during the seven years that were to follow. Now, in a reminiscent mood, I sit down to tell the readers of my autobiography, the story of the last seven years spent in the fossil fields, or in the laboratory preparing for study, the material that I have collected.

Two seasons my sons and I collected in the Kansas Chalk, the Lance Beds of the old Converse County that is now named Niobrara County, Wyoming, and in the Oligocene, of the same County. Strange to say, however, five years have been spent in the Dominion of Canada, where, with the assistance of my three sons, I helped build up a great collection of the Dinosaurs of the Red Deer River, Alberta, under the direction of the Geological Survey of Canada. The present year of 1916, with the help of my youngest son Levi, I have been engaged in the same service for the British Museum of Natural History. As my readers will bear witness, in the past, I have seen my choicest treasures for forty years leave my hands forever, to add to the glories of museums I shall in all probability never see. When the opportunity came, however, so suddenly and unexpectedly—the opportunity of a life time—to crown my last days with a monument that only time’s ravages or the vandal hand of man can efface, in that growing Dominion of the North that promises to be one of the great countries in the boundless Western Hemisphere, it seemed to me like a call from heaven. Though the ties of a lifetime, nearly, that bound me to many a dear friend at Lawrence, Kansas, must be severed. Though I must leave the protecting folds of my father’s flag and mine, and I must live under a flag that has waved a thousand years—under a Monarch, in fact—I, a republican of republicans! Think of it! After three years residence in the beautiful city of Ottawa, the capital of all the broad expanse North of the international line, after four seasons of work among buried dinosaurs and three winters spent in the laboratory of the Victoria Memorial Museum of Ottawa, I am free to confess I would not have known so far as personal liberty is concerned that I was all this time in the employ of his Royal Majesty George the Fifth of England and ruler of the British Empire. I have learned, I believe, that a man is as much a man amidst the snows of the Lady of the North, under the Union Jack, as under my own beloved Stars and Stripes. Our hopes, our ideals, our aims are much the same.

I will hurry over the first two years spent in the fossil fields of the United States after Henry Holt and Company published “The Life of a Fossil Hunter.” In 1910 we went to Wyoming. On Schneider Creek my second son, Charles M., made the discovery of the most remarkable duck-billed dinosaur the world has ever seen. The Trachodon I described in the last Chapter of “The Life of a Fossil Hunter” was the best one that had been discovered up to that time. Professor R. S. Lull of Yale University in speaking of the specimen George F. Sternberg had found in 1908 says in his paper, “On Ten Years Progress in Dinosaurs,” page 210 Proceedings of the Paleontological Society, 1912: “Impressions of the skin of this animal (Trachodon or duck-billed dinosaur), were already known from material in Washington, and from the fragment of a tail collected by Barnum Brown. It remained for the veteran collector Charles H. Sternberg however, in 1908, in Converse County, to bring to light by the aid of his three sons the most marvelously preserved dinosaur known to (Fig. 1) science. Here the skin is preserved with its complex arrangement of minute scales (Fig. 2) entirely bereft of defensive armor. Together with portions of the muscles, as well as the entire skeleton, with the exception of the hind feet and tail. This specimen was purchased of Mr. Sternberg by the American Museum and is now on exhibition.”

In 1909 Charles M. Sternberg discovered the magnificent skull of a Triceratops, also sold to the American Museum, and mounted there. This is the best skull of this species known, with the notable exception of the Utterback specimen at Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh. Charlie’s specimen was found on Seven Mile creek, two and a half miles northeast of the McKeon Sheep Ranch. The skull was over five feet long. The horns 33½ inches in length. The crest itself on weathering out was badly shattered, the fragments having fallen from a perpendicular cliff into a sandy ravine and becoming buried in the sand. Though we spent much time in sifting the sand through our fingers, Dr. Osborn sent us back the next year, when George and Levi Sternberg sifted tons of sand and secured enough additional fragments to enable the preparators at the American Museum to mount the skull in fine condition as is shown in photograph reproduced here. (Fig. 3.)

In 1910 Charlie was again remarkably successful. He found near the head of South Schneider Creek, a finer specimen even than the famous one mentioned by Professor Lull. How he found the specimen is well worth the telling. He discovered a large part of the tail sticking out of a rounded mass of sandstone; another section was in the ditch below. I was at the time camped on the other side of the Cheyenne River, and it took me nearly all day to return with Charlie who came after me in our one horse buggy. It was a bitter cold evening when we reached the locality, and in order to sleep, we built a big fire of dead cottonwood limbs, and when we were ready to leave the fire for bed, we raked off the coals and rolled out our bed on the warm earth beneath. We were under a sheltering bank that protected us from the wind. The next day the wind again blew a gale, and we stood on the bluff and swung our picks all day in our effort to get down to the floor on which the skeleton lay stretched out at full length. Our eyes were soon filled with the sand we loosened with our picks; but our enthusiasm knew no bounds, and that evening, I believe, the other boys, George and Levi arrived with the outfit, pitched a tent and cooked us a good meal under cover. It was a big undertaking however, to get that dinosaur out of the quarry and haul it to the railway at Edgemont, South Dakota, 75 miles away. It took us two months and a half of tireless effort. The skeleton had evidently sunk after death in quick sand, since the front limbs were lifted up along the sides of the body and reversed, showing the perfectly preserved webs that covered them. The head, and the neck were stretched to their full length, while the hind feet pointed downward. The animal lay on the ventral surface with the abdominal wall spread out. The skull was four feet long. Trunk and head 12 feet and 2 inches and the tail 5 feet and 6 inches. The entire body was covered with skin, not clinging to the bones as in the American Museum specimen George found in 1908, but covered as if with round muscles, the sand having taken the place occupied by the original flesh. Owing to the great size of the specimen, and as I was determined to save every particle of the skin, the sections we took up were very heavy, especially those composing the trunk, one of which weighed about 3,500 pounds. It took considerable skill and the combined strength of the four of us to handle these huge masses of rock and bone, especially as we had no tackle. We learned, however, that with a couple of cottonwood poles for levers and blocks of the same for fulcrums, we could hoist a section up, and then while the boys held it a few inches above ground I would shovel sand under it and tamp it with my shovel handle. Of course when they loosened their hold to take a new bite, it sank deeply into the sand again, but still we found we had gained an inch or two. Working thus all day we not only raised a section weighing 3,500 pounds four feet in the air, but moved it several feet to one side so we could run the wagon under it and load. I then came to the conclusion that if four men with nothing but poles, blocks, and sand, could move and handle such a heavy mass that the ancient Egyptians, with millions of laborers and endless tons of sand, could with nothing more than such simple tools have erected the pyramids.

The specimen when boxed weighed nearly 10,000 pounds. I sent it to Dr. Dreverman of the Senckenberg Museum at Frankfort on the Main. I shall never forget the effort I made to induce him to give up the specimen, or take another in its stead. A day or two after I received his acceptance of my offer, I received an offer from Dr. Brock of the Victoria Memorial Museum. He wished me to mount the specimen in Ottawa, and offered me double the price I was to receive from Senckenberg for the unmounted specimen. But it crossed the Atlantic. The last message I had of it, before this awful war cut off all communications, was that the head had been prepared and it was the best of which there was any record.

These two specimens which my party of three sons and my self have added to science, prove conclusively that the duck-billed saurians were great swimmers. My readers will remember that I was coming to this view slowly. In describing the splendid specimen George had found in 1908, on page 276 of “The Life of a Fossil Hunter,” I said “I have no doubt that the animal with lungs expanded to their full capacity often swam across streams of water.” I was reluctantly giving up Marsh’s and Cope’s ideas; they believed these dinosaurs lived on land, feeding off the tender foliage of trees; and I remarked, “The animal could use the front limbs as clumsy hands to hold down branches of trees from which to crop the tender foliage, or banners of moss.” When I wrote those lines I had but a single specimen to draw my conclusions from, and even this not yet prepared, and I had little knowledge of its habitat.

Now after eight years in the cemeteries of the duck-billed dinosaurs, with the discovery by my party of several new genera, as well as a careful study of their environment: as recorded in the rocks in which they lie buried, and eight months each year in the laboratory cleaning, mending, preparing and mounting them—my vision has broadened; I have indeed been forced by incontestible evidence to give up my old ideas in regard to their habits and surroundings. In fact Paleontology, like all human science—or rather scientific theories, for the actual facts of science never change—progresses. Evidence to prove certain views seemed conclusive to the old paleontologist; but better collections, trained students and further knowledge prove these views inadequate today. Entirely different views are held now, as in the case of the duck-bills, for instance. These lived in the water instead of on land, and consequently they had thin skin and strong paddles, or rather webbed feet.

I also discovered a wonderful deposit of figs a few rods from the Trachodon quarry. They fell in sand among teeth and bones of reptiles and fishes, as well as the impressions of rushes and other aquatic plants, and shell fishes. The sand packed solidly around them, and when they decayed their form was firmly molded in the sand. The cavity thus formed was filled with sand, and an exact cast of the figs was produced. Until then, less than a dozen fossil figs were known to me. I also discovered five beautiful palmetto palm leaves 18 inches in width, showing that the country at the time they grew was like the everglades of Florida, ridges between great marshes, through the center of which ran sluggish streams almost at a level with the near by ocean. The water was beyond tidewater, however, it was sweet.

In 1910 I found three Triceratops skulls and George one. Two of them went to the Senckenberg Museum to make a couple of mounted skulls for exhibition. We also secured much Trachodon material in addition to that already mentioned, a large part of a skeleton going to the British Museum of Natural History. George also found the most perfect specimen of a Trachodon tail I had seen up to that time. I sent it to Dr. Marcelin Boule for the Paris Museum of Natural History.

During the winter of 1911 we were preparing a huge skull, some seven feet long, of Triceratops for the Victoria Memorial Museum. Later, in the spring I was away, and Charlie was at work on it. One evening he had left the shop to go home when a Kansas cyclone struck the building and shoved one of the brick walls in as easily as if the building had been a house of cards. The weight of the brick falling on the skull not only crushed it so badly that it could not be restored and had to be thrown away, but it drove the heavy tailor’s table it was on through the floor. Mr. Constant the owner of the building saw the storm coming and ran upstairs to shut the west window. But before he could reach it the wall fell in and he had to run for his life up the falling floor, and fortunately reached the steps and got out of the building safely. Though the loss of so valuable a specimen that had cost me much time and labor was bitter indeed, the thought that my son had so narrowly escaped with his life made me more reconciled to the loss. I have, as already related, both seen, and been in cyclones, but this was the first one that ever destroyed such a valuable fossil for me. In the same building, but farther towards the east, we had a great fish (Portheus), skeleton 14 feet long. But when the floor from above fell in, the rafters covered it in such a way that it was not injured, and though covered with lath and plaster, it came out without a scratch, and is now mounted in the Victoria Memorial Museum. Our camp was visited by George’s wife and babies in 1910. We were camped on the Cheyenne River, and it was a great comfort and pleasure to have a woman in camp, and we soon noticed a change in the culinary department. It seemed like home to have a daughter and grandchildren in this desert land, and when we came in from a hard day’s work in the fossil beds they helped make us forget our labor and our care. These records of work in the Laramie, or rather as they are now called, the Lance beds (from Lance Creek in the immediate vicinity), show plainly that persistent, untiring efforts in a field (that was supposed to be exhausted by other explorers), by trained collectors, will meet with good results. Thirteen Triceratops skulls, I believe, were recorded by Hatcher, who with others spent years here. We not only secured six Triceratops skulls, but, what was worth far more, the nearly entire skeletons of two trachodonts wrapped in their skins, giving science an entirely new conception of these dinosaurs.

In 1911, I sent George to western Kansas with a party to collect in the Chalk and with wonderful results; for though I had secured four skeletons of the famous Tarpon-like fish of the Cretaceous, named Portheus molossus by Cope, he succeeded in finding the most complete skeleton known to science, now mounted in the British Museum of Natural History, in London. Mr. Pycraft, has pictured it in the London Illustrated News for March 1, 1913. “The giant to which I refer now” (he says), “has been dead a very long while, a million years or so [over 5,000,000 C. H. S.]. It remains in a most extraordinary state of preservation—will be found in the Geological Gallery. Measuring just fourteen feet in length, it must have weighed between four and five hundred pounds [a thousand likely C. H. S.]. It was obtained from the chalk of Kansas, and has quite a remarkable history. It was found by Professor Sternberg who has achieved a world-wide fame for his discovery of fossil fish and his quite amazing skill in digging his finds from the rock in which they are embedded. The specimen was found [by George F. Sternberg], exposed at the surface of the ground, and was much the worse for wear-and-tear of wind and rain and sun. But Professor Sternberg was equal to the occasion. For just as there are two sides to every question, so there are two sides to every fossil. The resourceful discoverer determined to get at the other side of this very stale fish; for the exposed side was useless. Accordingly he covered it with a thick layer of plaster-of-Paris and when this was set he proceeded to dig out the fossil from the bed of chalk. This accomplished, he cut away the rock from the specimen, and eventually succeeded in exposing the whole fish.” [The underside at least C. H. S.] (Fig. 4.)

I have quoted Mr. Pycraft at length as he has given the facts about as they occurred except only in giving me, instead of my son credit for the discovery. Why did this monster fish whose remains are not only abundant in the thousand feet of Kansas Chalk, but fragments of whose skeletons have been found in many parts of the world become extinct? From my long experience in the fossil beds I most surely believe that he had his day and disappeared, as has the Moa, and Great Auk, and many other species. I have collected redwood leaves and cones from the Dakota Group, Cretaceous, in Kansas, and in the Upper Cretaceous of Alberta, and Wyoming. Now however they range over a small territory along the Coast Range of California, and their days are numbered.

Animals come on the stage of life, exist for a greater or lesser period as it may happen, and then disappear; and the old saw “that every dog has his day” is literally true of the past as of the present. Another fine skeleton George found, to add to the trophies of his hunt after big game, was a beautiful little Tylosaur, or ram-nosed mosasaur. It was twelve feet long only, but was very complete indeed. This also went to Senckenberg Museum. (Fig. 5.)

In 1911, a young man I had employed, Mr. Jasperson of Lawrence, Kansas, found a fine skull of a Triceratops. Charlie prepared it in the same region since he had taken a homestead for a ranch, married, built himself a house, and spent the winter there, not only preparing the skull for the Paris Museum, but in cleaning the bones of a great Titanotherium, I had discovered near Seaman’s Old Ranch in the Seaman Hills. The fall of the same year, my sons, Charlie and Levi, and I with our assistant Mr. Jasperson, explored a new region in the Oligocene, on Plum Creek, 25 miles North East of Lusk, Wyoming, Niobrara County, a few miles south of the Lance Creek beds. We found an old river bed with its flood plain exposed on either side. It was wonderful indeed to gaze on the dry bed, that had been cemented together into solid conglomerate, of gravel sand, water-worn fossil wood and bones, while the old flood plains were as real, (though solidified now), as if they were flooded, but yesterday. This flood plain had been scarred, however, by ravine and canyon, ridge and bluff, that had bisected and thus exposed more of the contents than in the days high water covered it. Scattered everywhere was the richest harvest of fossil mammals I had ever seen, before or since. On the 11th of September, I secured the now famous skeleton of a huge Titanotherium, already mentioned. George and I mounted it the next winter in the Victoria Memorial Museum of the Geological Survey of Canada. The first great mammal to be mounted there. It stands 6 feet high at the hips, is 11 feet long to drop of the tail, 4 feet wide at the hips. Over the flood plain of the ancient river bed, that cut diagonally across the country, and in the Seaman Hills, we secured great numbers of Oreodons, a hog-like creature that once lived in great herds. I found myself fifty skulls, and the boys a hundred more.

A large number of these specimens were purchased by the Survey and are preserved in the Museum at Ottawa. The Miocene (Oligocene) beds are extensively exposed. Sculptured by wind and sand, rain and frost, into great square towered buttes, or oblong ones topped with a thick rock that weathers into perpendicular escarpments 20 feet or more in height, making very pleasing scenery. Below the hard stratum, are several hundred feet of greyish marl, some beds with more clay than others, which weathered into small chunks of clay, that covered the rocks, or others again disintegrated into dust. Other strata contained considerable fine sand, greenish in color. The lowest rocks of all, a purplish marl, rested unconformably upon the chalk of the Niobrara Cretaceous, filled with the typical Ostrea congesta, an oyster shell no bigger than a cent piece. Some of the canyons cut deeply into the chalk, put me in mind of those in the Kansas chalk with which I was so familiar.