“It is a Hyrachyus,” he said, “an early kind of cursorial rhinoceros. That means, Mr. Round-up Dick, that he was a rhinoceros with light legs, so that he could gallop like a horse. If you look at the rock, you can see that once it was mud, probably the bank of a small river. From the position of the skeleton—of course I can see only the skull and foot—the Hyrachyus must have got stuck and was trying to pull his feet out. But he was stuck fast then. That was three million years ago and he is stuck fast still.”
The cowboy looked at Antoine with frank admiration.
“An’ you c’n spot the brand as quick as that!” he said. “Which I’ve got to admit that you c’n call the turn on me. What happened to those beasts, since there aren’t any of ’em on the range? Flies get them, too?”
“Sabre-tooth cats got them, I guess,” said the boy. “Although the Hyrachyus could run some, with his three toes he probably couldn’t get away from the swift sabre-tooths. When you think what a rhinoceros is like, Dick, don’t you think it was a plucky stunt for them to get out of the swamps and try to make good on the plains? Plucky, but it didn’t go. For all we know, that chap up there may have been the very last of his race, and he not only died with his boots on, but died standing up, at that.”
“What do you figure on doin’ with the bones, now you’ve got ’em?”
“Cut them out,” declared Perry.
“Right out o’ the rock?”
“We’ll take rock and all,” the boy explained. “That whole block of stone has got to be quarried out, even if it weighs a ton. After it has got to the museum workshop in New York, workmen can spend several months carefully chipping away the rock until they get at the bones. It’s the hardest kind of work, Dick, and it has to be done by experts. Then, when every littlest bit of the rock has been chiseled away, the bones have to be mounted. We can make complete skeletons when the remains amount to at least two-thirds of the animal.”
“Which I don’t yet hog-tie the idee how you c’n tell a critter jest by his bones,” put in Round-up Dick. “You declares that cayuse in the rock is a rhinoceros the size of a sheep. There isn’t nary a hide or a bit o’ wool to tell what it looked like. So far as I can see that could ha’ been a wolf the size of a sheep or a yearlin’ cow the size of a sheep.”
“It is easy to tell by the teeth,” answered Antoine. “Didn’t you see me look at the teeth?”