“Bully! I’d like to fly over a glacier, too, and see what it looks like. Can you go that high?”
“I—guess so. Never tried it! We will, though!”
“Gee! Wouldn’t this be a great way to teach geography—from an aeroplane!”
“Sure would!—Great way to go camping, too.”
“’S right, only—it would be if there was just the two of us,” sighed Ted ungrammatically. “Could you carry enough grub?”
“We could get fresh supplies every few days, from some ranch.”
The next day they went back for the rest of the party and showed them Ted’s fossil, entering the cave the way Radcliffe had left it. Norris had spent one summer with fossil hunters in the dry gullies of the Southern end of California, he told them, where through scorching days and thirsty nights they had searched for any bit of bone that might lie amid the shale or imbedded in strata the edges of which might be seen on the face of a sun-baked bluff. The summer before, a group of geology men from a rival University had actually camped within a hundred yards of what was later discovered to be a deposit of rare fossils. It was therefore with heightened satisfaction that their reconnaissance had resulted in the discovery and excavation, bone by bone, of the complete skeleton of several most interesting prehistoric monsters that had lain all these ages embedded in the shale.
One bone four feet long, he told them, and weighing several hundred pounds, had been found in fragments in the shale, but it had been fitted together again, done up in plaster bandages and braced with splints, quite as a surgeon treats a broken leg. Another, found embedded in solid rock, had to be shipped in the rock, each piece being numbered as it was removed from the cliff as an aid to fitting it together again. Then with hammer and chisel the delicate feat of cutting away the rock and leaving the bone exposed was slowly and painstakingly accomplished. Thus have the bones buried before ever man trod the earth been made to tell their story. Often it takes more than a single specimen to reconstruct for the scientist the whole of the creature, but relics of fully thirty Triceratops have been discovered in different parts of the world, and where one skull has a broken nose, another shows it intact, and so on through its entire anatomy.
Its habits may in part be reasoned out, as for instance, if its hind legs are disproportionately long, it likely walked erect at least sometimes.
“That, as it happens, was not the case with Triceratops,” he added. “There was only a slight difference between his fore and hind legs. Triceratops had teeth made for browsing, not for rending flesh; his single claw, round and blunt, does not indicate any pugnacious tendency on his part, and the solidity of his bones are found to-day in either a very sluggish animal or a partially aquatic one. The shape and rapid taper of the tail vertebræ indicates a rather short tail, round rather than flat,—ill adapted for swimming,—and so following through the list, till we have a Triceratops elephantine in general build, though more like a rhinoceros in face with a horn over his nose and two over his eyes, a horn-supported neck ruff, and a generally sluggish mode of life.