I was not employed by that institution, but the agreement was, in case I secured a good specimen, it was to go to them. I must acknowledge I felt rather dubious when Dr. Osborn of the American Museum wrote me that he had had parties in these beds four years, searching without success for a specimen. For weeks and weeks we four examined every bit of exposed rock in vain. The rock consisted of clay and sandstone, the latter both massive and cross-bedded. Scattered through the great deposits of sandstone were peculiar-shaped masses of very hard flinty rock, with the same physical characteristics but with superior hardness. These added strange forms to the land sculptury. Almost every form the mind can imagine is found here, from colonies of giant mushrooms, to human faces so startling as to secure instant attention from the observer. (Figs. 38 and 39.)
A general view of the country from an elevated butte shows many cone-like mounds, resembling table mountains or even haystacks in the hazy distance! As the rocks, and even the flint-like material, readily disintegrate, the creeks that run east into the Cheyenne River soon radiate like the rays of a fan and deeply scar the narrow divides into rather deep canyons and narrow ravines. Perhaps a thousand feet of these fresh-water beds, are laid down in a basin surrounded, on all sides, by the marine, Fort Pierre, and Fox Hills Cretaceous.
Buck Creek on the south, Cheyenne River on north and east, and a line through the mouth of Lightning Creek would roughly give the area of the Laramie Beds we explored. They cover about a thousand square miles. Here in a country given up entirely to cattle and sheep ranges with but little of the country fenced, meeting no one but now and then a lonely sheep herder, my tribe of fossil hunters entered with bounding hope that we might find some of these famous dinosaurs.
Here is the border land between the Age of Reptiles and of Mammals, where mammals first appear as small marsupials. We secured several teeth of these early mammals. Day after day hoping against hope we struggled bravely on. Every night the boys gave answer to my anxious inquiry, What have you found? Nothing. Often we ran out of palatable food, as we were 65 miles from our base, and did not always realize how our appetites would be sharpened by our miles of tramping over the rough hills and ravines. One day in August, Levi and I started in our one-horse buggy to a camp we had made near the cedar hills on Schneider Creek. As we passed a small exposure which I had not gone over, I left him to drive and went over the beds of reddish shale, the remnant of an old peat-bog. I found the end of a horn core of Triceratops, and further excavation showed I had stumbled upon the burial place of one of these rare dinosaurs. How thankful we were that after so much useless labor we had at last secured the great object of our hunt. It will prove a beautiful skull when prepared and mounted under the direction of Dr. Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology in the British Museum, where so many of my discoveries have gone.
Unfortunately the skull was somewhat broken up, and one horn core is missing. But one side of the face with the large horn core, the back of the head, and the great posterior crest, seems entire, as well as large pieces of the other side of the face, and a fine specimen will be made of it. The total length of the skull is 6 feet 6 inches. The horn core over the eye is 2 feet 4 inches high; while the circumference in the middle is 2 feet 8 inches, and it is 15 inches in diameter at the base.
This was a fully matured animal. As the bony ossicles of the head armature are co-ossified with the margin and remain as undulations more or less sharply defined, I am inclined to believe that they are ornaments. They might assist a little in defense but not offense.
In the mean time my oldest son, George, told me of a region he had explored a half-mile from our camp near the head of a ravine. Here we had found a natural cistern full of rain-water, protected from the sun and cattle by a couple of great concretion-like masses of rock that covered it. Over the divide where I had found the great skull, between Boggy and the breaks of Schneider near its mouth in Cheyenne River, George took Levi and myself. The evening before, I took the skull in to Lusk for shipment. George pointed out a locality in which he had found a bone-bed, where we later secured many teeth of reptiles and fishes, scales of ganoid fishes, bones of small dinosaurs and crocodiles and the beautifully sculptured shells of turtles, Trionyx, etc. As there was still a tract of a few hundred yards to be explored the two boys started to go over it, while I went to the bone-bed. They soon joined me with the information that they had found some bones sticking out of a high escarpment of sandstone. George had found part of the specimen in one place and Levi another part soon afterwards. I requested George to carefully uncover the floor on which the bones lay.
While we were taking in our skull, George and Levi ran nearly out of provisions, and the last day of our absence lived on boiled potatoes. But in spite of this they had removed a mass of sandstone 12 feet wide, 15 feet deep, and 10 feet high.
Shall I ever experience such joy as when I stood in the quarry for the first time, and beheld lying in state the most complete skeleton of an extinct animal I have ever seen, after forty years of experience as a collector! The crowning specimen of my life work!
A great duck-billed dinosaur, a relative of Trachodon mirabilis, lay on its back with front limbs stretched out as if imploring aid, while the hind limbs in a convulsive effort were drawn up and folded against the walls of the abdomen. The head lay under the right shoulder. One theory might be that he had fallen on his back into a morass, and either broken his neck or had been unable to withdraw his head from under his body, and had choked to death or drowned. If this was so the antiseptic character of the peat-bog had preserved the flesh until, through decay, the contents of the viscera had been replaced with sand. It lay there with expanded ribs as in life, wrapped in the impressions of the skin whose beautiful patterns of octagonal plates marked the fine sandstone above the bones. George had cut away the rock, leaving enough to give the impression that even the flesh was replaced by sandstone, giving an exact picture of him, as he breathed his last some five million of years ago.