“‘Nonsense,’ I said to him, ‘there are the Palisades, right across the river from your home. You can get there for a nickel and a half an hour’s ride. I miss my guess if that isn’t a good fossil-hunting ground.’
“Less than a month after that, Perry, the famous skeleton of a Phytosaurus was taken out of those very rocks.”
“By one of those chaps?”
“By a group of Columbia College boys,” was the reply. “They were interested in geology and had gone over there one Saturday to do a little field work ‘on their own.’ Getting hungry, they sat down on a flat rock to eat lunch, and while lunching, one of them noticed some brownish stain on the rock. Half idly, he said:
“‘This looks like a vertebra!’
“One of the others laughed, but the third, examining the stains, suggested:
“‘It might be bone, at that. Let’s take a bit home and find out!’
“But when they tried to chip it out they found the bone as hard as the rock. Still, they got a small piece and tested it in the laboratory for phosphate, because they knew that if the sample were rich in phosphate it must have come from some living thing. Sure enough, they found phosphate and decided it was bone. They telephoned to the Museum, and as soon as our men went to the find, we recognized at once that it was part of a skeleton. We chiseled away the rock and found what became known as the ‘Fort Lee Reptile.’”
“And it was a Phytosaurus?” the boy asked. “What does a Phytosaur look like?”
“There were a lot of different Phytosaurus, Perry, but most of them resembled crocodiles, though more lizard-like than a modern crocodile. The Fort Lee specimen was christened Rutiodon Manhattanensis, and it’s the only one of that kind ever found.”