How the salamander tribe has degenerated since the days of these powerful creatures! Supplied with both gills and lungs, they dominated land and water, and increasing and multiplying in the tropical atmosphere, filled the swamps and bayous of this region. To-day we pull from some well or spring a weak creature called a mud puppy, and it is hard to realize that its ancestors, twelve million years ago, were strong and mighty, the monarchs of creation.
To return to Mr. Craddock’s pasture; on July twentieth my notes read: “I am suffering from the heat, my tongue badly coated. However, I have got some splendid material. If I succumb to the awful heat and die, my discoveries will have done much toward enriching the collection at Munich.”
On July twenty-first, I continue: “It is fearfully hot to-day, and I cannot work the beds without great suffering. I found a little skull.”
The hot weather continued, and I went out to the cabin on Coffee Creek. Pet, our four-year-old, got away, and when George took her from a herd of horses, he found a big hole in her shoulder. “Both horses are failing fast,” my notes read. “Have to send George in for feed. It is hard on the team to have to haul a load this weather through dust knee-deep, with no water fit to drink.”
On the twenty-sixth, I was left alone, and went a mile north to the bone bed and began to dig into the face of a hard greenish layer of clay-stone, near a place where I had found some fragments in former years. I was delighted to find a pocket with two good skulls in situ, and the next day George returned with his load, and I had some fresh water, which soon, however, grew lukewarm. We found two more skulls in the pocket referred to, one of which was the Labidosaurus hamatus Cope, one of the earliest of reptiles. Another was that of a new genus and species which I found later, when we went back to Grey Creek to get a camp ready to receive Dr. Broili. He was to come directly from Munich to my camp in the red beds.
On the first of August, as we were out of provisions, we went into town. I rented a large room over a store building, and made tables and unpacked specimens for Dr. Broili’s inspection. While I was working there, a storm of grasshoppers struck the building, beating against it like hailstones; and the next morning the ground was covered with them.
On the fifth, we drove out to our old camp on Grey Creek, and pitched two tents with the fly stretched between. The walls were elevated, and we were able to make a shade against the rays of the relentless sun. I went a couple of miles north, over the table mountain above camp, and found two extremely beautiful skulls of the long-horned amphibian,[[2]] Diplocaulus magnicornis Cope, a strange animal of which I have already spoken. I found also a specimen of the gar-pike, that ancient fish which has left its enameled scales in the rocks of many formations, whose descendants are still living in our rivers.
On the eighth of August, in spite of the debilitating heat, I started on a long trip to the head of Brushy Creek, on horseback. I climbed Table Mountain, which was, perhaps, three hundred feet above the camp, and struck west along the divide between the two creeks. I frequently left the horse tied to a fence, while I plunged down into the gorges on either side. At last, about three miles northwest of camp, at the bend of a branch of Brushy Creek, I noticed a denuded tract of the kind of bed I have already described, to which an abundance of bog iron lent a metallic luster; the very place to look for fossils.
The first thing I found was the perfect skull, six inches long, of a batrachian (Diplocaulus copei Broili); then, lying on the surface, another beautiful skull (Varanosaurus acutirostris Broili), with many of the bones of the skeleton, from which the hard red matrix had been washed off clean. The upper and lower jaws were locked together, and the long row of glistening teeth shone in the fierce light. The eyes were set far back, and the nose openings were near the front. It was so different from anything I had ever seen before that I was sure it must be new. Dr. Broili, in describing it, speaks of it as the most perfect specimen ever found in these beds. Nearly all the other skulls I had secured are compressed vertically, while this was compressed laterally.