Where They are Found. The chief dinosaur localities in this country are along the flanks of the Rocky Mountains and the plains to the eastward, from Canada to Texas. Not that dinosaurs were any more abundant there than elsewhere. They probably ranged all over North America, and different kinds inhabited other continents as well. But in the East and the Middle West, the conditions were not favorable for preserving their remains, except in a few localities. Formations of this age are less extensive, especially those of the delta and coast-swamps which the dinosaurs frequented. And where they do occur, they are largely covered by vegetation and cannot be explored to advantage. In the arid Western regions these formations girdle the Rockies and outlying mountain chains for two-thousand miles from north to south, and are extensively exposed in great escarpments, river cañons and "badland" areas, bare of soil and vegetation and affording an immense stretch of exposed rock for the explorer. Much of this area indeed is desert, too far away from water to be profitably searched under present conditions, or too far away from railroads to allow of transportation of the finds at a reasonable expense. Fossils are much more common in certain parts of the region, and these localities have mostly been explored more or less thoroughly. But the field is far from being exhausted. New localities have been found and old localities re-explored in recent years, yielding specimens equal to or better than any heretofore discovered. And as the railroad and the automobile render new regions accessible, and the erosion of the formations by wind and rain brings new specimens to the surface, we may look forward to new discoveries for many years to come.
In other continents, except in Europe, there has been but little exploration for dinosaurs. Enough is known to assure us that they will yield faunæ no less extensive and remarkable than our own. We are in fact only beginning to appreciate the vast extent and variety of these records of a past world.
In a preceding chapter it was shown that the chief formations in which dinosaur remains have been found belong to the end of the Jurassic and the end of the Cretacic periods. The Jurassic dinosaur formations skirt the Rockies and outlying mountain ranges but are often turned up on edge and poorly exposed, or barren of fossils. The richest collecting ground is in the Laramie Plains, between the Rockies and the Laramie range in south-central Wyoming, but important finds have also been made in Colorado and Utah. The Cretaceous Dinosaur formations extend somewhat further out on the plains to the eastward, and the best collecting regions thus far explored are in eastern Wyoming, central Montana and in Alberta, Canada.
The First Discovery of Dinosaurs in the West.
By Prof. S.W. Williston.
Most great discoveries are due rather to a state of mind, if I may use such an expression, than to accident. The discovery of the immense dinosaur deposits in the Rocky Mountains in March, 1877, may truthfully be called great, for nothing in paleontology has equalled it, and that it was made by three observers simultaneously can not be called purely an accident. These discoverers were Mr. O. Lucas, then a school teacher, later clergyman; Professor Arthur Lakes, then a teacher in the School of Mines at Golden, Colorado; and Mr. William Reed, then a section foreman of the Union Pacific Railroad at Como, Wyoming, later the curator of paleontology of the University of Wyoming—even as I write this, comes the notice of his death,—the last. I knew them all, and the last two were long intimate friends.
In the autumn of 1878 I wrote the following:[19]
"The history of their discovery (the dinosaurs) is both interesting and remarkable. For years the beds containing them had been studied by geologists of experience, under the surveys of Hayden and King, but, with the possible exception of the half of a caudal vertebra, obtained by Hayden and described by Leidy as a species of Poikilopleuron, not a single fragment had been recognized. This is all the more remarkable from the fact that in several of the localities I have observed acres literally strewn with fragments of bones, many of them extremely characteristic and so large as to have taxed the strength of a strong man to lift them. Three of the localities known to me are in the immediate vicinity, if not upon the actual townsites of thriving villages, and for years numerous fragments have been collected by (or for) tourists and exhibited as fossil wood. The quantities hitherto obtained, though apparently so vast, are wholly unimportant in comparison with those awaiting the researches of geologists throughout the Rocky Mountain region. I doubt not that many hundreds of tons will eventually be exhumed." Rather a startling prophecy to make within eighteen months of their discovery, but it was hardly exaggerated.
It is impossible to say which of these three observers actually made the first discovery of Jurassic dinosaurs; whatever doubt there is is in favor of Mr. Reed.
Professor Lakes, accompanied by his friend Mr. E.L. Beckwith, an engineer, was, one day in March, 1877, hunting along the "hogback" in the vicinity of Morrison, Colorado, for fossil leaves in the Dakota Cretaceous sandstone which caps the ridge, when he saw a large block of sandstone with an enormous vertebra partly imbedded in it. He discussed the nature of the fossil with his friend (so he told me) and finally concluded that it was a fossil bone. He had recently come from England and had heard of Professor Phillips' discoveries of similar dinosaurs there. He knew of Professor Marsh of Yale from his recent discoveries of toothed birds in the chalk of Kansas, and reported the find to him. As a result, the specimen, rock and all, was shipped to him by express at ten cents a pound! And Professor Marsh immediately announced the discovery of Titanosaurus (Atlantosaurus) immanis, a huge dinosaur having a probable length of one hundred and fifteen feet and unknown height. And Professor Lakes was immediately set at work in the "Morrison quarry" near by, whence comes the accepted name of these dinosaur beds in the Rocky Mountains. Professor Lakes once showed me the exact spot where he found his first specimen.