I worked for several weeks on Indian Creek and Coffee Creek with very poor returns, but on the nineteenth of September, Mr. Galyean, who was of a sanguine temperament, announced that he had discovered the complete skeleton of a huge beast. So, filled with high ropes, I followed his lead along the rough face of the mountains, until at last, when we were completely exhausted by the ruggedness of the way, he pointed out a pile of the weathered and broken bones of a species so common that they were not worth picking up.
Dropping in a moment from my hill of expectancy into a slough of despond, I turned homeward, Mr. Galyean, who was as disappointed as I was, leading the way to a short cut through a gap in the mountains. As he got on the trail, which had been made by animals on their way to the spring, he stooped and picked up something, remarking, “Why, here’s a bone!” I took it, and was astonished to find it a complete skull, covered with a hard siliceous matrix from a heavy bed of Indian red clay, which was completely covered with concretions. I had never carefully explored this horizon, as I had taken it for granted that it was barren. And I suppose that other collectors had imagined the same, for although it was within a mile of Willow Springs, where Boll and Cummins and other collectors had camped through a series of years, I was the first to discover this deposit of extinct animals.
We followed the trail over a slight rise into an amphitheater a couple of acres in extent, and then over a higher rise into another, a little larger, carved out of the mountain side and entirely denuded of soil. These two amphitheaters proved to be the richest fossil beds I ever discovered in the Permian of Texas. I quote the following entry from my notebook regarding this discovery: “After finding the perfect skull discovered by Galyean, we at once got into the richest ground I have ever seen in these beds. I got a perfect skull, and Galyean another. We have worked too low, it seems. This rich bone bed is on top of the beds I have been working, at the heads of the ravines that cut into the face of the mountains. The concretions in which the bones are preserved are in red clay, and are of greenish and other colors.”
In my excitement over this rich find, I forgot my disgust with Galyean for leading me on a wild-goose chase, forgot how tired I was, forgot my dinner, forgot everything, and set to work at once collecting skulls and bones. I remember that I filled my collecting bag with seventy-five pounds of skulls, from less than an inch to over eight inches in length, and all new to me and to science. This load I started to carry down the steep trail to camp, a mile away. The good-natured Galyean, when he saw me tottering under the load, offered to relieve me of my burden, but I answered with such vehemence that no one should touch it, that I would break my back first, that it was more precious than its weight in gold, that he gave it up and fled down the mountains to camp, so that he might at least have a warm meal waiting for me when I arrived.
How can any man who has not had the experience himself, realize the glory of my triumphal march down that rugged trail? Not Nebuchadnezzar, when his chariot headed the army that was carrying away the treasures of the Lord’s house from Jerusalem, with the king of Judah, blinded and bound in shackles of brass, in his train, could have known a prouder joy than I did now over this discovery of a new region, in the very heart of the old, which promised so rich a harvest of rare fossil remains. This is an instance of an experience which has been very common in my life—when I have been most completely hopeless and discouraged, I have made my greatest discoveries.
Of the remarkable batrachians and lizards which twelve million years ago peopled the estuaries and bayous of the Permian ocean shores, I found, during that three months’ expedition, forty-five complete or nearly complete skulls, many of them with more or less perfect parts of the skeletons attached, and forty-seven fragmentary skulls, ranging in size from less than half an inch to two feet in length; the whole collection containing one hundred and eighty-three specimens of the extinct life of the Texan Permian. The American Museum, which secured this splendid material, was unable to describe and publish it then, while the results of my famous expedition to these beds in 1901 for the Royal Museum of Munich were at once described by Dr. Broili. Consequently the American Museum lost much of the glory which attaches to the description of new material. However, the Permian collection in the American Museum is now being worked out with results of great importance to science.
Encouraged by my success on this expedition, I set out with high hopes on January twentieth of the following year to continue my work for Professor Cope in these beds. On reaching my headquarters at Seymour, I succeeded in hiring an old man with a team and wagon, and on the twenty-fifth of January, I made my first camp on Bushy Creek, ten miles north of Seymour.
Three days later I found what I believed promised to be a fine specimen of the ladder-spined reptile, Naosaurus, called fin-backed by Cope. A number of perfect spines were exposed, presenting the possibility of securing a complete specimen. I worked very carefully over this skeleton, hoping to take it out whole and in good shape. It lay in red and white sandstone, which easily disintegrated on the surface into shale-like flakes. The spines and transverse projections, which terminate in rounded knobs, were all broken in situ, and were also flexed and tilted with the strata, so that great care was necessary in following them. They were about three inches apart. I numbered the spines 1, 2, 3, etc., not with reference to their natural position, but to the order in which I came to them. A good many of the rounded ends of the lateral spines were missing, having been washed down the slope. I hoped to find them later.
As I studied these remarkable spines, many of them, near the center of the body, three feet high, with the lateral spines alternating or opposite, I instinctively called the creature the ladder-spined reptile; and I cannot see how Professor Cope could have imagined that these spines had any resemblance to the mast and yard-arms of a vessel, and that there was a thin membrane stretched between them which caught the breeze and acted as a sail. Later discoveries show it to be a land animal. Professor Osborn’s magnificent restoration of the Naosaurus is shown. (Fig. [33].)
As I have said, it was a long and trying task to take up the skeleton, as it was in thousands of fragments. If I had dug them up as one would dig potatoes, no one would ever have had the patience to put them together again. So I took up each spine in sections, wrapping say fifty fragments together, and numbering them No. 1, spine 1, package 1, etc.; so that when the whole collection came to be put together, the sections could be mended separately first and then joined to one another.