[1]. A restoration of the Uintacrinus is shown in the same illustration (Fig. [11]a) in which the Clidastes is represented.
These beautiful globular animals were stemless, and evidently lived in swarms, as single specimens are never found. According to Mr. Springer, when death overtook one of these swarms, it fell to the bottom, where the first individuals were buried in the soft mud and preserved, while the others, not being so protected, disintegrated. The limy plates of the calices and those of the arms, which were thus mingled together above the perfect specimens, became compressed into a hard slab, in the bottom of which the perfect specimens are firmly impressed.
Great numbers of these creatures have been discovered in the English chalk, but they consist only of the disintegrated plates.
CHAPTER V
DISCOVERY OF THE LOUP FORK BEDS OF KANSAS AND SUBSEQUENT WORK THERE, 1877 AND 1882–84
About the first of July, 1877, I received orders to go north to the Loup Fork River in Nebraska to search for vertebrate fossils in beds of the Upper Miocene, called by Hayden the Loup Fork Group. I happened to meet, however, an old line hunter, Abernathy by name, who had brought into Buffalo his last load of buffalo hides, and he told me that a little above his cabin, on the middle branch of Sappa Creek in Decatur County, there was the skull of a mastodon, sticking out of the solid rock.
As a visit to his house would not take me far out of my way, I followed his lead; and thanks to the observation of this old hunter, who was scalped in front of his door the next year by a band of hostile Kiowas, I had the privilege of discovering the rich fossil beds of the Loup Fork Group in northwestern Kansas, and found enough to do without crossing into Nebraska.
The whole country north of Buffalo was without human habitation until we reached the old man’s cabin. On our way there, as we were driving one sultry day down the long slope to the south branch of the Soloman, we chanced to look behind us, and as high as the eye could reach, the air was as black as midnight with flying dust, dry grass, and buffalo chips. Experience had taught us what all this meant. Will Brouse laid the whip to the ponies, but they did not need it. They, too, had taken fright, and tore down the hill at breakneck speed. On reaching the valley, we came upon a perpendicular bluff, over twenty feet high, impinging on the level flat, and Will swung the horses under its protecting shelter. We sprang out, and while one of us unhitched and tied the horses, the rest caught hold of the wagon and held it down. In an instant all was dark, while the rush of a mighty wind swept over us with a terrible roar and passed on, leaving a calm in its wake. As we followed its trail along the river, we found large trees twisted off at the stump or broken to pieces, their branches scattered like straws.
About sundown one evening, the old man pointed out, in a side draw of the middle fork of the Sappa, his mastodon. I sprang from the wagon, shouting, “It’s a monster turtle!” And so it proved to be, a great land turtle, over thirty inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, and fifteen inches high; Testudo orthopygia Cope called it. The back of the carapace was sticking out of a ledge of grey sandstone. We applied our picks, and soon had the specimen collected. (Fig. [22].)
Now began an extremely interesting search for this new fauna in Kansas. The rocks in this part of the state usually consist of gray sand cemented together with washed chalk and soluble silica. The foundation on which these beds were deposited is the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous. The river beds were cut in this soft lime, and later on the wash of the land mingled the whiting with the sand and gravel which the streams brought down from the mountains. The tops of the hills are capped with this conglomerate gray sandstone in ledges many feet in thickness, and as the materials composing it easily disintegrate, great masses of it lie at the bases of the cliffs, resembling old mortar. I called them mortar beds, and the stratigraphers have adopted the name. Indeed, they are mortar beds not only in name, from a fancied resemblance to mortar, but in fact, as all the early settlers can testify. It was no trouble for them to find beds so soft that the material could easily be dug out, and when mixed with water and spread with trowels over the inside walls of a sod house, it made a very comfortable home. When it comes to comfort, the settlers of the short-grass country have gained nothing by building frame instead of sod houses. The early settler’s sod house was cool in summer and warm in winter, and those who live in more modern houses in order to keep up with the times will even now speak with regret of the change.