The Dryptosaurus, a Giant Carnivorous Reptile.
This form is closely allied to the Tyrannosaurus, of which several fine skeletons were discovered by the Museum expeditions. The pose of the restoration is a little too agile for a reptilian combat.
“Why, Uncle George?”
“That is Bone Cabin Hill, right at the end of that ‘draw,’” was the reply, “and it is the site of the greatest find of dinosaurs made in a single locality in any part of the world. One of our own Museum men made the discovery, in the spring of 1897.
“We had been steadily working down all the beds that hold the fossils of mammals, the beds that you and I have seen, Perry, and in the spring of 1897, the Museum decided to undertake the exploration of the rocks that lay below them, rocks of the Cretaceous and Jurassic Periods. We were especially anxious to explore the rocks of the upper Jurassic, which showed the first dawn of the Mammal Age and so we made our way here, to the Laramie Plains, but over towards the base of the famous Como Bluffs.
“Marsh and Cope, the great pioneers of all American fossil work, had explored these bluffs thoroughly, so that we were not very sanguine of success.”
“Still, Uncle George,” the boy suggested, “weathering is always going on.”
“Of course,” the professor answered, “that was what we counted on. When we reached the bluffs, we found numbers of bones of giant reptiles strewn along the base, tumbled from the rocks above, as gradual weathering had exposed them, but most of these were broken and so badly weathered that other collectors had passed them by. The outlook was not good, but after a few weeks we found parts of the skeleton of the Diplodocus and the Brontosaurus.”
“Let’s see,” said Perry thoughtfully, “the Diplodocus was the long-limbed one and the Brontosaurus was a heavy brute.”
“Fairly heavy,” agreed the professor, “the one we found would have weighed at least thirty-eight tons when alive. The skeleton was sixty-six, nearly sixty-seven feet long. One of our men discovered it and it took the whole of one summer to extract the skeleton from the rock, here, on the Laramie Plains, and ship it to the Museum. In the New York workshops it took another two years of steady work, all day long, every day, to chip away the rock from the bones, to cement the brittle and shattered petrified bone, so that it would be strong enough to bear handling, and to restore the missing parts of each of the broken bones. And then, Perry, the mounting of the skeleton had not been begun.”