I may begin this closing chapter by mentioning some other specimens which I have discovered, or which my sons have, for, thank God, I have raised up a race of fossil hunters. My second son, Charles M. Sternberg, has in his person recently fulfilled a dream of forty years of my own, by discovering the most complete skeleton known of Professor Marsh’s great toothed-bird, Hesperornis regalis, the Royal Bird of the West. Unfortunately the skull is missing, otherwise the nearly complete skeleton is present, and strange to say in normal position, showing that Dr. F. A. Lucas is right in his restoration of the Martin specimen as mounted in the National Museum, i. e., as a loon, a diver instead of a wader, as had been supposed. Our specimen, however, shows a much longer neck than he had imagined. Strange indeed was this long-necked diver with its tarsus at right angles with the body and its powerful web-footed feet. The body was narrow, a little over four inches wide, with a backbone like the keel of a boat. The head was ten inches long and armed with sharp teeth. By keeping the body horizontal it could explore a column of water six feet high and wide, for any unfortunate fish within the zone of its activity. I would name this great loon the Snake-Bird of the Niobrara Group. This specimen I longed to find for so many years, but was glad to give the credit to my son. It is to be mounted in the American Museum, and I picture it as it left my laboratories (Fig. [41]).
A word also about that great flying machine of the Cretaceous, the flying lizard Pteranodon. The skeleton and a very fine skull, which my son found on Hackberry Creek in 1906, is now mounted in the British Museum, where my warm friend Dr. A. Smith Woodward assures me “my specimens are greatly admired.”
Especially have I been fortunate in the Kansas Chalk where my son, George Fryer, has charge as I write these lines of my twentieth expedition to those beds, and where he has discovered, and safely collected and shipped to my laboratory, a great plate of the beautiful stemless Crinoid Uintacrinus socialis. I sent one section to Professor M. Boule, of the National Natural History Museum of France, at Paris. Hundreds of these rare animals are represented in this slab (Fig. [42]).
Fig. 41.—Skeleton of Hesperornis regalis, the Giant Toothed-bird of the Kansas Cretaceous.
Discovered by Charles M. Sternberg. In American Museum of Natural History.
Fig. 42.—Slab of Fossil Crinoids, Unitacrinus socialis, CONTAINING 160 CALYCES, COVERING FOUR BY SEVEN FEET.
Before these pages go to press, and a year after I began work on them, I am pleased to be able to tell my readers of two noble specimens of the Pleistocene Age I have just secured from the plains of Kansas, that great treasure house of the animals of the past. One is a majestic Bison, whose head towering above that of his fellows supported a pair of horn cores measuring six feet from tip to tip. Along the curve the distance is eight feet. The length of the head is two feet, the distance between the horns sixteen inches, and from the center of the orbits, one foot. These splendid horn cores were uncovered through a fortunate chance. It seems that the Missouri Pacific Railway, wishing to shorten the creek in the vicinity of Hoxie, Sheridan County, Kansas, cut a new right-of-way for it across a bend. Their excavation came within two feet of the bones buried below, thirty-five feet from the surface of the earth; a friendly freshet washed them out, and they were discovered by Mr. Frank Lee and Harley Henderson, of Hoxie, Kansas, June 15, 1902. I was so fortunate as to secure them in June, 1908. I have filled them with white shellac, and they are now in condition to be preserved always, a specimen of the grand old bison of the Pleistocene time. Now their burial places are three thousand feet nearer the stars than the day they were buried there, as then the climate was semi-tropical and the land they roamed over near sea level. The largest pair of horn cores of a similar bison are preserved in the Cincinnati Natural History Museum. I copy from one of their records: “The most conspicuous figure on Plate IX, with immense horn cores, is of the long extinct broad-fronted bison. This specimen, by far the finest of its kind in existence, is the greatest prize in the Cincinnati Museum. It was found in 1869 on Brush Creek, Brown County, Ohio, and through the efforts of Dr. O. D. Norton it was acquired by the Museum in 1875.” It gives me great pleasure to show my readers a photograph of the Kansas form that measures along the curve of the horn cores a foot and a half more than the famous Ohio specimen. (Fig. [43].)
The great Columbian Elephant, whose jaw I illustrate and have still in my possession, represents one of the largest, or the largest, of its kind ever discovered. It was found near the town of Ness City, in Ness County, Kansas. This giant lived at the same time the great Bison existed. The last molars have pushed out the worn premolars and the other two molars, and occupy the entire jaw, having a grinding surface of 5 × 9 inches. The lower parts of the teeth flare out like a fan, and measure twenty inches along the top of the roots. The greatest circumference of the jaws is 26½ inches, and the length 32 inches. Unfortunately, the articulations are worn away, likely by rolling in some river bed. I secured this noble representative of American Elephants in June, 1908 (Fig. [44]).
