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.