“You can travel over it after every rainstorm or windstorm, for that matter. Then, after I’ve spent a day or two at the Washakie, I’m going to the Bridger Bad Lands. They’ve been cut down a little further, so that all the Upper Eocene has been eroded and the Middle Eocene is exposed. So you see, Perry, in the Washakie formation we have a chance of finding the fossils of animals that lived in the Upper Eocene Period; and, a few miles away, in the Bridger Bad Lands, we can find the fossils of half a million years earlier. Then, in the Wasatch, there are two places I’m going to visit, the Wind River Valley and the Gray Bull River country; the Wind River exposes the top of the Lower Eocene Rocks and the Gray Bull the bottom layers. Then, if I can get time, I’ll go to New Mexico, where there has been more erosion and the rocks are cut away down to the Basal Eocene, and, after that, I plan to come back to Wyoming for the famous Laramie formation, which is cut down to the Cretaceous Period, or the Age of Chalk, and which has been our great hunting ground for the Dinosaurs.”
“My Pteranodon was from the Age of Chalk.”
“Certainly, Perry, but it was from a marine formation, earlier than the Laramie. You see the Cretaceous Ocean covered Kansas, but did not cover Wyoming. I want to make an exact map of the relations of these strata to each other so as to show clearly the way in which the rocks were laid down and to give a continuous picture of the life of the animals that lived during those times. You know well, Perry, that I’m always more interested in fossils for the sake of the ideas of primitive life that they give, than for fossils themselves.”
“Same here,” said the boy. “And where are we going to strike first, Uncle George? You said the Washakie formation. Whereabouts, at Haystack Mountain?”
Again the scientist looked approvingly at his nephew.
“You’re really doing quite well, Perry,” he said. “What made you think of Haystack Mountain?”
“I’ve been interested in Eocene deposits ever since that Fayum trip,” the boy replied, “and I found out that Haystack Mountain was the same age as the beds we worked in Egypt, where I found the Moeritherium. That’s sort of made me feel that Eocene fossils were my particular end.”
“Do you expect to find another Moeritherium in Wyoming?”
“No, of course not. The Moeritherium isn’t found anywhere except in Africa. You said so.”
“Are the elephants found anywhere else?”