“Friday, July 11.—This is to record the most successful day since we have been in the field. We have collected three sets of under-jaws, three skulls. It has been extremely hot. We have put in eight hours of hard work.”
“Saturday, July 12.—To-day I got out and packed our three skulls and three lower jaws. They were within the space of a square yard. We got some very fine bones, and best of all, a perfect front foot in position, a perfect humerus, a perfect femur, except proximal articulation, the premaxilla of a cat with a huge canine (saber-toothed tiger). We got great quantities of the bones of the feet, an axis, and one other vertebræ in good state of preservation, a fine scapula, etc. This afternoon has been the hottest day of the season, but this evening the wind changed to the north, and it is quite cool. I got in addition to the specimens mentioned a maxilla of a saber-toothed tiger. The enormous young canine was two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide.”
I might go on and quote indefinitely, but the story would be about the same. I recall, however, one or two incidents connected with my work in this field, which may be amusing or interesting to my readers.
Once in 1882, while collecting for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University, I met an old gentleman and his dear old wife, the hair of both showing upon it the snows of many winters, sitting on a board laid across a dry-goods box to which two wagon wheels had been attached. A team of ponies harnessed with rope instead of leather, with lines of the same material, completed the outfit. The old man and his wife sat up very straight and dignified and demanded of me what I was doing in that part of the country.
“Oh,” I answered, “I’m looking for rhinoceros bones in the loose sand of the hills here.”
“Well,” the old man said, “I am interested in these old bones myself. I don’t claim to be a scholar; in fact, I am quite illiterate, but I think when this earth was in a molten state, these old hippopotamuses wallowed around in the mud and got congealed in the rocks.”
The following incident I did not find quite so amusing. One day I discovered turtle shells sticking out on either side of a narrow gulch which cut through a large deposit of sand. In digging out those already in sight, I found many more; collecting in all some twenty fine specimens, but all quite small. Following down the gorge, I discovered that it opened out, on Beaver Creek in Rawlins County, into a great amphitheater several acres in extent and almost denuded of vegetation; an ideal place for fossil hunting, as the elements had been digging out and removing the sand for ages. And sure enough, I soon stumbled upon the complete shell and skeleton, four feet in diameter, of a specimen of Cope’s Testudo orthopygia; but it nearly broke my heart to find that while the specimen had weathered out in a perfect condition, some vandal—for I shall ever maintain that the wanton destruction of life that now is or of the remains of life that once was, is wicked,—some man had chopped it all to pieces with a mattock.
Passing on in a not very pleasant frame of mind, I came upon another individual of huge proportions, which had suffered the same fate, and then upon another; all that this rich-looking ground afforded had been utterly ruined.
Angry at the thought that any man should commit such sacrilege,—for to me these footsteps of the Creator in the sands of time are sacred,—and bitterly disappointed, since I knew that I should very likely never again come upon such huge specimens of the reptilian life of that age, I walked into camp blinded by hot tears, and failed to notice a stranger who was sitting there on a box.
“Some infernal vandal has been up this ravine,” I shouted to Will, “and dug up with a mattock three of the finest turtles I ever saw.”