MY FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE KANSAS CHALK, 1876
I spent the winter of 1875 and ’76 as a student at the Kansas State
Agricultural College.
Here a party was gathered to explore western Kansas for fossils, under
the leadership of Professor B. F. Mudge, the enthusiastic state
geologist and a popular professor of the college. The expedition was to
be made under the auspices of Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale College,
whose efforts have secured for that institution the largest collection
perhaps in the world of American fossil vertebrates.
I made every effort in my power to secure a place in the party, but
failed, as it was full when I applied. It has always been hard, however,
for me to give up what I have determined to accomplish; so, although
almost with despair, I turned for help to Professor E. D. Cope, of
Philadelphia, who was becoming so well known that a report of his fame
had reached me at Manhattan.
I put my soul into the letter I wrote him, for this was my last chance.
I told him of my love for science, and of my earnest longing to enter
the chalk of western Kansas and make a collection of its wonderful
fossils, no matter what it might cost me in discomfort and danger. I
said, however, that I was too poor to go at my own expense, and asked
him to send me three hundred dollars to buy a team of ponies, a wagon,
and a camp outfit, and to hire a cook and driver. I sent no
recommendations from well-known men as to my honesty or executive
ability, mentioning only my work in the Dakota Group.
I was in a terrible state of suspense when I had despatched the letter,
but, fortunately, the Professor responded promptly, and when I opened
the envelope, a draft for three hundred dollars fell at my feet. The
note which accompanied it said: “I like the style of your letter.
Enclose draft. Go to work,” or words to the same effect.
That letter bound me to Cope for four long years, and enabled me to
endure immeasurable hardships and privations in the barren fossil fields
of the West; and it has always been one of the joys of my life to have
known intimately in field and shop the greatest naturalist America has
produced.
As soon as the frost was out of the ground, having secured a team of
ponies and a boy to drive them, I left Manhattan and drove out to
Buffalo Park, where one of my brothers was the agent. The only house,
beside the small station building, was that occupied by the section men.
Great piles of buffalo bones along the railroad at every station
testified to the countless numbers of the animals slain by the white man
in his craze for pleasure and money. A buffalo hide was worth at that
time about a dollar and a quarter.
Here at Buffalo I had my headquarters for many years. A great windmill
and a well of pure water, a hundred and twenty feet deep, made it a
Mecca for us fossil hunters after two weeks of strong alkali water. At
this well Professor Mudge’s party and my own used to meet in peace after
our fierce rivalry in the field as collectors for our respective
paleontologists, Marsh and Cope.
What vivid memories I have of that first expedition!—memories of
countless hardships and splendid results. I explored all the exposures
of chalk from the mouth of Hackberry Creek, in the eastern part of Gove
County, to Fort Wallace, on the south fork of the Smoky Hill, a distance
of a hundred miles, as well as the region along the north and south
forks of the Soloman River.
When we left Buffalo Station, we left civilization behind us. We made
our own wagon trails, two of which especially were afterwards used by
the settlers until the section lines were constructed. One of them ran
directly south, crossing Hackberry Creek about fifteen miles from the
railroad, at a point where there was a spring of pure water—a rare and
valuable find in that region. We camped here many times, and made such a
good trail that it was used for years. Our second trail extended across
the country, striking Hackberry Creek where Gove City now stands, and
led over Plum Creek Divide, whose high ledges of yellow chalk served us
as a landmark for twenty miles. From this point we could see Monument
Rocks, and near them the remains of an old one-company post on the Santa
Fé Trail. Our trail then led up the Smoky Hill to the mouth of Beaver
Creek, on the eastern edge of Logan County, and followed the old road as
far west as Wallace.
Prairie-dog villages extended west along all the water courses, and open
prairies to the state line, and we were rarely out of sight of herds of
antelope and wild horses. Near the present site of Gove City, on the
south side of Hackberry Creek, there is a long ravine with perpendicular
banks ten feet or more in height. This ravine was at that time used as a
natural corral by some men who made a business of capturing these wild
ponies by following them night and day, keeping them away from their
watering places, and giving them no chance to graze, until they were
exhausted. They were then easily driven into the ravine and roped; after
which they were picketed on the prairie and soon became tame. These wild
horses were swift travelers, and the most graceful of all the wild
animals of the West, being distinguished for the beauty of their flowing
manes and tails.
There was constant danger from Indians, and in order that we might
escape as much as possible the eagle eye of some scout who might be
passing through the country, our tent and wagon-sheet were of brown
duck. This blended with the dry, brown buffalo grass, as we traveled
from canyon to canyon, and could not be distinguished very far even by
the trained eye of an Indian.
I never carried my rifle with me. I left it in camp or in the wagon, for
I soon decided that I could not hunt Indians and fossils at the same
time, and I was there for fossils.
I had no unpleasant experiences with Indians, however, although I came
very near it once. It was one day late in June, when we were about three
miles north of Monument Rocks. A gentle rain early in the morning had
taken the glare from the chalk cliffs, and as this is a circumstance
favorable to the discovery of fossils, I shouldered my pick and started
down the canyon, eagerly scanning the rocks on either side.
About a mile below camp I was startled to come upon a pony trail, so
deeply cut into the soft chalk that I knew each horse must be carrying a
burden. It had been made within the hour, and as I was anxious to find
out what it meant, I took the back trail to the river. There I found
that a large band of warriors had sought shelter from the rain in a
willow thicket, tying bunches of the twigs together and throwing deer or
antelope skins over them to shed the water. They had squatted within
these shelters until the storm had passed, and then cooked their
breakfasts, as the live coals in many of the ash heaps testified.
There were no squaws or children along; it makes no difference whether
women are white or red, they always lose some of their belongings
wherever they go, and there was none of such property at this camp. The
ponies had been tied to the bushes and not allowed to graze, showing
that the party had not expected to camp here, but had simply taken
shelter from the rain to avoid the discomfort of traveling with wet
buckskin moccasins and leggings. I learned later that it was a large
band of Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, under their famous chief,
Crazy Horse, going north to join commands with Sitting Bull, in Montana.
The chalk beds which were the field of my labors once composed the floor
of the old Cretaceous ocean, and consist almost entirely of the remains
of microscopic organisms, which must have fairly swarmed in the water.
They were discovered by the late Dr. Bunn, of Lawrence, while a student
in the laboratories of the Kansas State University, after Dana and
others had said there was no chalk in America.
When the animals that inhabited this ocean died or were killed, their
carcasses, buoyed up by the gases that formed after death, floated about
on the surface of the water, losing a limb here, a head there, a trunk
or tail somewhere else. These detached fragments, sinking to the bottom,
were covered by the soft ooze of the ocean floor, and remained there as
fossils, while the sedimentary rock was being lifted three thousand feet
above sea level.
My explorations began on Hackberry Creek, where I went over every inch
of the exposed chalk, from the creek’s mouth to its head, in Logan
County. Then I searched the river and the ravines that cut into its
drainage area along the flanks of the divides.
* * * * *
Perhaps a description of a typical day’s experience in one of the long
ravines that gash the southern slope of the country may be of interest
to my readers.
Human beings, in order to accomplish any result of moment, must be
reasonably comfortable, that is, they must not be over-hungry or thirsty
or sleepy. If they are, their minds will dwell upon their discomforts,
and they will accomplish little, as the hungry boy, who keeps turning
his head in the direction of the sun and wondering whether it is not
almost dinner-time, is not likely to hoe much corn. My first step,
therefore, must be to find water and pitch a camp.
But often I have no idea where water is to be found, and must give as
much care to the search as if I were looking for fossils. So while the
driver follows me with the wagon, I hunt for water and fossils at the
same time.
Both sides of my ravine are bordered with cream-colored, or yellow,
chalk, with blue below. Sometimes for hundreds of feet the rock is
entirely denuded and cut into lateral ravines, ridges, and mounds, or
beautifully sculptured into tower and obelisk. Sometimes it takes on the
semblance of a ruined city, with walls of tottering masonry, and only a
near approach can convince the eye that this is only another example of
that mimicry in which nature so frequently indulges.
The chalk beds are entirely bare of vegetation, with the exception of a
desert shrub that “finds a foothold in the rifted rock” and sends its
roots down every crevice. This shrub is one of the fossil hunter’s worst
enemies. Sending its roots down the clefts in the rock, it searches out
the fossil bones that have been preserved there, and feasts upon them
until they have been entirely consumed, thus thriving at the expense of
God’s buried dead. More fine fossil vertebrates have been destroyed by
this plant than by the denudation of the rock, or the vandal hand of
man, although both of the latter have been powerful factors in the
destruction of fossils. In those days, however, there were no curiosity
hunters to dig up the precious relics, so that they were more abundant
than they are now.
All this time I am wandering along the canyon in search of water.
Sometimes I come upon gorges only two feet wide and fifty feet deep;
sometimes for five miles or more the sides of the ravine will be only a
few feet high.
I know that there is water at the river, but it is so far away from my
work that I go on and on in the hope of finding some nearer at hand.
Dinnertime comes, and the day is so hot that perspiration flows from
every pore. A howling south wind rises and fills our eyes with clouds of
pure lime dust, inflaming them almost beyond human endurance. Still no
water. The driver, with horses famishing for it, makes frantic gestures
to me to hurry. To ease my parched lips and swelling tongue, I roll a
pebble around in my mouth, or, if the season is propitious, allay my
thirst with the acid juice of a red berry that grows in the ravines.
After hours of search, I find in moist ground the borings of crawfishes;
with line and sinker I measure the depth to water a couple of feet below
in these miniature wells. The welcome signal is given to Will, the
driver, and he digs a well, so that both man and beast may be supplied.
If I could sum up all the sufferings I endured in the chalk fossil
fields, I should say that I suffered more from the lack of good drinking
water than from all the other ills combined. Except when we were in the
vicinity of one of the half-dozen springs that are scattered about over
an expanse of country a hundred miles long and forty wide, the only
water that we had to drink was alkali water, which has the same effect
upon the body as a solution of Epsom salts, constantly weakening the
system. Yet whole neighborhoods of settlers to this day have no other
water for themselves or their beasts, and they show the deteriorating
effects in their faces and their walk.
If I have found, scattered along a wash, the bones of some fossil fish
or reptile, as soon as we have pitched camp and eaten our meal of
antelope meat, hot biscuits, and coffee, we both return with pick and
shovel, and, carefully saving each weathered fragment, trace the remains
to where the rest of the bones lie _in situ_, as the scientists
say,—that is, in their original position in their rocky sepulcher.
Then comes the work in the hot sun, whose rays are reflected with added
fervor from the glaring surface of the chalk. Every blow of the pick
loosens a cloud of chalk dust, which is carried by the wind into our
eyes. But we labor on with unfailing enthusiasm until we have laid bare
a floor space upon which I can stretch myself out at full length. Lying
there on the blistering chalk in the burning sun, and working carefully
and patiently with brush and awl, I uncover enough of the bones so that
I can tell what I have found, and so that when I cut out the rock which
holds them I shall not cut into the bones themselves.
After they have been traced, if they lie in good, hard rock, a ditch is
cut around them, and by repeated blows of the pick, the slab which
contains them is loosened.
This is then securely wrapped and strengthened with plaster or with
burlap bandages that have been dipped in plaster of the consistency of
cream. In the case of large specimens, boards are put lengthwise to
assist in strengthening the material, so that it will bear
transportation. Later I hope to tell of a method, originated by me, by
which the most delicate fossil, even if preserved in very loose, friable
rock, may be detached and transported safely.
So, as a hunter will follow the deer, through thickets and over rocks,
forgetting hunger and cold and thirst in his anxiety to get a glimpse of
his game, that he may add its antlers to his list of trophies, we fossil
hunters, Professor Mudge’s party and my own, sought our prey over miles
and miles of barren chalk beds, cheerfully enduring countless
discomforts.
Urged on by enthusiasm and the desire to secure finer and finer
material, I went over every inch of the acres of exposed chalk along
these ravines and creeks, hoping each moment to find stretched before my
delighted eyes a complete skeleton of one of those old sea serpents
described by Cope, or a specimen of that wonderful _Pteranodon_, or
toothless flying reptile, whose wing expanse was twenty feet or more.
All day, from the first streak of light until the last level ray forced
me to leave the work, I toiled on, forgetting the heat and the miserable
thirst and the alkali water, forgetting everything but the one great
object of my life—to secure from the crumbling strata of this old ocean
bed the fossil remains of the fauna of Cretaceous Times.
The incessant labor, however, had a weakening effect upon my system so
that I fell a victim to malaria, and when a violent attack of shaking
ague came on, I felt as if fate were indeed against me.
I remember how, one day, when I was in the midst of a shaking fit, I
found a beautiful specimen of a Kansas mosasaur. _Clidastes tortor_ Cope
named it, because an additional set of articulations in the backbone
enabled it to coil. Its head lay in the center, with the column around
it, and the four paddles stretched out on either side. It was covered by
only a few inches of disintegrated chalk.
Forgetting my sickness, I shouted to the surrounding wilderness, “Thank
God! Thank God!” And I did well to thank the Creator, as I slowly
brushed away the powdered chalk and revealed the beauties of this
reptile of the Age of Reptiles. Its snake-like tail and flexible
movements caused it to appear to Cope a veritable serpent, so that he
put it in his new sub-order _Pythonomorpha_.
I well remember the terrible journey over the rough sod to the station
with this specimen. I was seized with another attack of ague, and as I
jolted about in the bottom of the wagon, I thought that my head would
surely burst. Little I cared, though, so that I got my beloved fossil to
the Professor.
[Illustration:
FIG. 6.—SKULL AND FRONT LIMB OF _Clidastes tortor_.
As collected and preserved by Charles Sternberg. (Now mounted in the
Carnegie Museum.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 7.—SKELETON OF _Clidastes tortor_.
(In American Museum of Natural History.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 8.—SKELETON OF RAM-NOSED TYLOSAUR, _Tylosaurus dyspelor_.
(In the American Museum of Natural History.)
]
And I felt amply repaid for my sufferings when the next winter I laid
out the skeleton on the platform of St. George’s Hall, in Philadelphia,
where the Professor spoke for an hour to a spellbound audience,
unfolding to them the wonders of the creatures that lived when this old
world was young. At the close, which came suddenly, as was usually the
case in Cope’s speeches, before the people had had time to come back
from the misty past, he turned to where I was sitting on a step, and
beckoned me to him. When I got within reach, he turned me around to the
audience and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you
Mr. Sternberg, the man who found this beautiful example of the fauna of
the Cretaceous.”
He was much pleased with the hearty applause that greeted me.
This incident illustrates one of the characteristics of Cope which
endeared him to all his collectors. He did not think that the money he
paid them paid for the dangers and privations they endured, far from
their friends and the comforts of civilization. On the contrary, he gave
them credit in all his publications for their discoveries of species new
to science. And this is the one essential thing to the collector—at
least the true collector who values his labor as something that cannot
be measured by money. All work done for science has a value above that
of money. Lesquereux might have made money if he had remained a
watchmaker, and Cope would have won a fortune as a ship-owner if he had
entered his father’s office, but both men realized that there is work
which offers higher rewards than riches; they gave their lives to
science, and they will never be forgotten.
But we are far afield; let us return to the plains and canyons of the
Kansas chalk beds.
I recall many trying experiences during that memorable first season.
Often we got into barren ground and walked over miles and miles of
blistering chalk with nothing to show for our trouble. In one locality
the remains might be very abundant, while in another, perhaps just as
promising in appearance, thousands of acres would be entirely barren.
But we had to go over it all before we could be sure that there was
nothing to repay our toil.
Once after two weeks of fruitless effort, we drove into a deep canyon,
cut into the upper or reddish chalks near Monument Rocks, which are so
much richer in fossils than the yellow or whitish beds farther east.
I had barely pitched the tent and got among the beds when I discovered
not only that I was the first collector to visit the canyon but that it
was rich in fossil remains. I found two specimens of _Platecarpus_, a
species of Kansas mosasaur, in a low knoll, separated by but three feet
of chalk.
At the same time one of those uncomfortable cold rains set in, and I was
not much encouraged when Will told me that we had no food left. There
was plenty of corn for the ponies, but no coffee, flour, bacon, or
canned goods, not even an antelope; and we were forty miles from our
base of supplies. I would not leave, however, without my load of
fossils, as I feared that during my absence my rivals would come upon
this Eldorado and clean it out. So the cook was told to parch a
kettleful of corn, and we made our meals on that. In fact, we filled our
pockets with it and lived on it for three days, eating most of the time
to keep ourselves sufficiently nourished.
We had always depended for fuel upon the buffalo chips which even then
were strewn about everywhere, but fortunately we found here an old dead
cottonwood tree, a rare thing in that region, where even the willows on
the river banks are short and stunted. But for this wood we should have
suffered.
We remained there until we had loaded our wagon with eight hundred
pounds of fossil vertebrates.
During the summer my constant use of a large butcher knife in cutting
away the chalk from specimens caused a felon to form in the palm of my
hand. A fistula resulted, and for ten days I slept but little, and could
not work in the field.
Finally, worn out by hard labor and constant attacks of ague, I felt
that my strength was failing, and called on Professor Cope for an
assistant. He sent me J. C. Isaac, from Illges Ranch, Wyoming; but
matters were not much improved, for Mr. Isaac had but a short time
before seen five of his companions shot down and scalped by a band of
marauding Indians, and only the swiftness of his horse had saved him
from the same fate. Consequently, he saw an Indian behind every bush;
and, although I had never been afraid before even when I learned that a
large party on the warpath had passed close to my camp, now, worn and
tired as I was, I became infected with his fears.
When I found that I could do nothing to get myself out of this mental
condition and be of further use to the Professor, I wrote to him, and
was ordered home for rest, to meet him later in Omaha, in company with
Mr. Isaac.
But before we return to civilization, will my readers go with me on
another expedition to these Kansas chalk beds? “How fleet is a glance of
the mind!” Instead of an arid, treeless plain, covered with short grass,
a great semi-tropical ocean lies at our feet. Everywhere along the
shores and estuaries are great forests of magnolia, birch, sassafras,
and fig, while a vast expanse of blue water stretches southward.
“But,” you ask, “what is that animal at full length upon the water in
that sheltered cove?”
Watch it a moment! It raises a long conical head, four feet in length
and set firmly upon a neck of seven strongly spined vertebræ. This
powerful head terminates in a long, bony rostrum, also conical in shape.
Back of the neck are twenty-three large dorsal vertebræ, followed by six
pygals, as Dr. Williston calls them, to which the hind arches and
paddles are attached. The body terminates in an eel-like tail of over
eighty elements, each strengthened by a dorsal spine above and a
V-shaped bone, called a chevron, below; so that a vertical section of
the lizard would have a diamond shape.
But see! an enemy in the distance is attracting our reptile’s attention.
It sets its four powerful paddles in motion, and unrolling its forked
tongue from beneath its windpipe, throws it forward with a threatening
hiss, the only note of defiance it can raise. The flexible body and long
eel-like tail set up their serpentine motion, and the vast mass of
animal life, over thirty feet in length, rushes forward with
ever-increasing speed through water that foams away on either side and
gurgles in a long wake behind.
The great creature strikes its opponent with the impact of a racing
yacht and piercing heart and lungs with its powerful ram, leaves a
bleeding wreck upon the water. Then raising its head and fore paddles
into the air, it bids defiance to the whole brute creation, of which it
is monarch.
A noble specimen of this great ram-nosed Tylosaur is now mounted as a
panel on the wall of the American Museum, in New York, at the head of
the stairs on the right (Fig. 8); and a little further on, is a splendid
skull of the same species, which I discovered on Butte Creek, in Logan
County. Fig. 9 shows a restoration of this species.
Doubtless many of the ankylosed bones which we fossil hunters often find
in the chalk of the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous were broken by
blows from these ram-nosed lizards.
We have in Kansas three genera of these mosasaurs as the celebrated
Frenchman, Cuvier, named them in 1808. The word literally means a
reptile of the Meuse, and it was given them because the first specimen
ever found was taken from the quarries under the city of Maestricht, on
the River Meuse. For this information, and for much more as to the
anatomy of the Kansas mosasaurs, I am indebted to Dr. Williston’s
splendid work in Volume IV of the University Geological Survey of
Kansas: Paleontology, Part I; although, of course, I obtained most of my
knowledge from the hundreds of specimens which I collected myself.
Among these are four especially fine specimens, nearly complete, of the
flat-wristed _Platecarpus coryphæus_ Cope. One of them I sent to the
Iowa State University, with head, column, and limbs nearly in position,
and still bedded in their native chalk. This fellow, who was over
eighteen feet long, must have sunk so deep in the slimy mud of the
ocean-bed that even the gases formed in his stomach could not lift his
body to the surface. A second specimen was sent to the British Museum of
Natural History, in London; a third to Munich, Bavaria, and a fourth to
the Roemer Museum, in Hildesheim, Germany.
[Illustration:
FIG. 9.—RAM-NOSED TYLOSAUR, _Tylosaurus dyspelor_.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of
Natural History.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 10.—SKULL OF THE FLAT-WRISTED MOSASAUR, _Platecarpus coryphæus_.
(In the Kansas State University.)
]
This last specimen is the best I ever took from the Kansas chalk until
1907. It is twenty-five feet long. Unfortunately, the head was all
washed away, with the exception of the mandibles and a few bones of the
skull. The most remarkable feature of this specimen was the presence,
for the first time in my experience, of the complete cartilaginous
breastbone with the cartilaginous ribs, which are very rare. They were
described for the first time from the noble Bourne specimen, by Dr. H.
F. Osborn, of the American Museum.
This mosasaur, _Platecarpus_, is the most common species known, and is
almost as large as the big _Tylosaurus_. It differs from the latter,
however, in the shape of the short, strong paddles and the blunt
rostrum. The skull in the illustration (Fig. 10) is that of a very fine
specimen, one of my discoveries, which was mounted by Mr. Bunker, of the
natural history department in the Kansas State University. I have never
seen a more complete skull, or one that shows the height so well, in any
specimen, unless it is the little _Clidastes velox_, in the Kansas
University collection. You will notice the triangular shape of the head,
with the strong bones arching back to support the lower jaw by the
pulley-like quadrate bone. Notice also that the suspensorium, instead of
curving down so that its groove fits over the rounded edge of the
quadrate, is straightened out. This is caused by its having been
flattened and distorted, as nearly all fossils are, by the immense
pressure to which it has been subjected. Observe the conical shape of
the head in front of the eye-rim, terminating in the hard, blunt
rostrum. It is believed by the authorities that a blow from this ram,
delivered at full speed, would put an adversary out of commission.
But how did this creature feed itself, when all its teeth are for
grasping, none for masticating? And how did it hold its prey, when it
has no claw-armed fingers, only weak paddles for swimming?
In answering these questions, we shall describe two characteristics of
the mosasaurs which differentiate them from all other reptiles.
If you will look closely at the photograph, you will notice, within the
head, and below the eye-socket, a row of recurved teeth. These are the
teeth on the pterygoid bones, which are located on either side of the
roof of the mouth, near the gullet, and are provided with twelve teeth,
more or less. The lower jaw with its powerful sweep on its fulcrum,
pressed the living prey firmly upon these teeth so that it could not
come forward and escape. Then notice the ball-and-socket joint just back
of the tooth-bearing bone or dentary, of the lower jaw. After the
wriggling, struggling prey had been fastened on the teeth in the roof of
the mouth, the mandibles were shortened by a spreading of this central
joint, and the victim was forcibly pushed down the throat.
The species _Clidastes velox_ of these Kansas mosasaurs, was, as its
name indicates, very agile, with beautiful bones of so firm a texture
that they have suffered less than any of the other fossil vertebrates
from the vast pressure to which they have been subjected, not only from
the enormous amount of material that has been heaped above them, but
from the still more powerful upward push which has raised their
burial-place three thousand feet above sea level.
I sent one very beautiful specimen of _Clidastes_ to Vassar College; so
complete, in fact, that it can be made into a panel mount.
I think no artist has more fully appreciated what these great reptiles
must have been when alive than Mr. Sidney Prentice, now of the Carnegie
Museum, whose beautiful restoration, made to illustrate Dr. Williston’s
work on Kansas Mosasaurs, is here reproduced (Fig. 11_b_). I am under
obligations to him for the labor of his pencil. He has certainly put
life into this denizen of the old Cretaceous ocean, and I do not believe
that anyone, after a careful study of the skeleton, could find any fault
with the restoration, from a scientific standpoint.
In this connection, I should like also to call attention to the
beautifully preserved skull I sent to the Carnegie Museum. This specimen
shows a complete side view of the head, with mandibles and maxilla, the
teeth interlacing as perfectly as in life. The sclerotic plates that
protect the eyeball are also in natural position.
The luxuriant life of the Cretaceous ocean was certainly remarkable.
Fish swarmed everywhere, and often, as the specimens are uncovered, the
scales are picked up by the wind, crumbled into dust, and scattered in
every direction.
Among the most common of the fossil bones in those early days were those
of a huge fish, whose vertebræ, with fragments of heads and jaws, were
found in great abundance, although no perfect specimen has been
discovered. Professor Cope, who described this fish, called it _Portheus
molossus_. I secured a fine specimen on Robinson’s ranch, in Logan
County. It lay in a small exposure of chalk along a grassy hill slope,
within a stone’s throw of the ranch buildings. My son George was my
assistant then, and we got out this specimen in the month of November.
Our boarding place was five miles away, and every night the ground froze
hard. Nothing daunted, we went to work with a will.
The head and trunk region had already been uncovered, and many of the
ribs and spines had been swept away and lost. We took up the head and
front fins in a great slab of plaster, as the chalk in which they lay
had disintegrated under the influence of the frost. A violent windstorm
was raging at the time, and to complete the slab, George had to bring
water from a tank a hundred yards away. I can still see that boy running
up with his pail of water, trying to carry it so that it would not be
emptied by the raging, howling wind that was almost tearing his coat
from his back, while I stood and shouted, “Hurry up! The plaster’s
hardening!”
The rest of the column, to the tail, we took up separately, and as the
great tail-fins and many of the caudal vertebræ were present with their
spines, embedded in solid chalk, we removed five feet of superincumbent
rock, cut a trench around the slab containing the bones, and took it up
by digging under it.
This made another huge mass to be handled. The section containing the
head weighed over six hundred pounds, and this tail section almost as
much. The latter froze solid before we could get it up to the tent,
where we kept a fire burning to dry out the water from the bones and
thus prevent the injurious effects of freezing. I should like just here
to express my gratitude to those ranchmen who gave their time and
strength to assist me in handling these huge sections.
When they had been packed with excelsior in strong boxes, a wagon was
backed up against the level platform which we had made in throwing out
the rock and soil that lay over the specimen. The boxes were then set on
edge, and, with the help of boards and rollers, loaded into the wagon
for shipment to the railroad thirty miles away.
But my troubles with this specimen were not over; on the contrary, they
had just begun. When the section containing the head was being raised on
to a table in my shop it fell and its weight was so great that the head
was badly shattered, as was the plaster that secured the bones in place
below.
Then all through the winter, while I was trying to dry out the specimen,
so that it could be cleaned and prepared for shipment, the rats, which
inhabited the walls of the laboratory in great numbers, kept pulling out
the bran and excelsior that had been put around the delicate bones to
protect them; thus causing the broken plaster, with the bones of the
head, to sink lower and lower, as the packing was carried away from
underneath.
[Illustration:
FIG. 11.—RESTORATION OF KANSAS CRETACEOUS ANIMALS.
(From drawing by S. Prentice, after Williston.)
_a_, _Uintacrinus socialis_; _b_, _Clidastes velox_; _c_,
_Ornithostoma ingens_.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 12.—GIANT CRETACEOUS FISH, _Portheus molossus_ (above), compared
with a six-foot modern Tarpon (below).
By courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
]
Driven to think out some plan of saving the specimen from destruction, I
conceived the idea of shoving a number of wooden pegs of various lengths
under the broken fragments, so as to push them up into their places and
hold them firmly there. All the excelsior was then taken away from
beneath them, a frame of lumber made around the section, and the whole
space filled with plaster which held all the broken bones in place.
In this specimen I found for the first time a complete column of
eighty-five vertebræ, a very important find, as these vertebræ are of so
nearly the same size that in restoring an incomplete specimen there was
no way of estimating how many of them there ought to be, and for
anything to the contrary, one might go on adding them indefinitely, as a
certain man in Europe added an enormous number to his mounted specimen
of a _Zeuglodon_.
This now famous specimen is mounted above the Bourne Tylosaur, in the
corridor of the Halls of Paleontology, at the American Museum. Dr. Henry
Fairfield Osborn, in his report describing it, says: “The noble specimen
of which a preliminary description is here given, adds another to the
many services which Mr. Charles H. Sternberg has rendered to vertebrate
paleontology. It was secured by him in the year 1900, near Elkader,
Logan County, Kansas. Originally the specimen had been probably
complete, but portions of the skeleton, especially the ribs and spines,
were injured and partly removed by previous explorers. The fish was
purchased by the Museum in 1901, and mounted and partly restored, under
the direction of the writer, by Adam Hermann, with the able assistance
of Mr. A. E. Anderson. Total length, from tip of tail to a point
directly above premaxillaries, 15 feet, 8 inches. Length of skull, 2
feet, 2 inches. Spread of tail, 3 feet, 9 inches.” (Fig. 12.)
At the time it was mounted, this great predaceous fish of the Cretaceous
was said to be the most striking example of a fossil fish in any museum
of the world. Since that day, however, a still finer one has been sent
to the Carnegie Museum. This specimen is much superior to that at the
American Museum, as the ribs, spines, pelvic fins, arches, and anal fin
are in position.
I should certainly be guilty of a great injustice to my friend and the
friend of paleontology, Mr. W. O. Bourne, of Scott City, whose name has
already appeared in these pages in connection with the great Tylosaur in
the American Museum, if I did not give him due credit for his share in
the securing of this specimen. He discovered the splendid fish and
tumbled a small mountain over on top of it to hide it. Then he kindly
gave it to me, and after much digging, my son was able to get trace of
it. Mr. Bourne showed his wisdom in thus covering it up, not only from
the elements, but also from man, who, out of curiosity, has destroyed
some splendid examples of creative power. I shall mention one or two as
object lessons before I complete this history.
But let us put life into this fish, whose bones now lie in the Carnegie
Museum.
We are back again where the two mosasaurs did battle royal for our
enjoyment. Watch that ripple! It is caused by a shoal of mackerel
scurrying in toward shallow water, in a mighty column five feet deep.
They are flying for their lives, for they have seen behind them their
most terrible enemy, a monster fish with a muzzle like a bulldog’s, and
huge fangs three inches long projecting from its mouth. Two rows of
horrid teeth, one above and one below, complete its armature. The great
jaws, fourteen inches long and four deep, move on a fulcrum, and when
they have dropped to seize a multitude of these little fish, they close
with a vise-like power. The crushed and mangled remains pass down a
cavernous throat to appease a voracious appetite.
The powerful front fins are armed with an outer ray that moves on a
joint in the pectoral arch, a long recurved piece of solid bone,
enameled on the outer side and more powerful as a weapon than a
cavalryman’s sword. This single-edged sword is three feet long, and
commands the respect of its owner’s enemies, the great saurians, or
Kansas mosasaurs. Our fish has only to swim up close to the abdomen of a
sleeping reptile, and lay it open for several feet with one sudden
stroke. If that is not sufficient, a slap of the powerful tail, with a
span of nearly four feet, finishes the work.
But see! nearer and nearer the great fish comes, mouthful after mouthful
of the fishes falling into its horrid jaws. It must be starving; so
eager is it for its prey that it seems unconscious of the fact that the
tide has turned and is moving outward. Now it discovers its danger and
turns, but too late. The water has gone back to the deep, leaving it
struggling for breath in a shallow pool. It thrashes wildly about with
its tail, whose sticky secretions help to envelop it more and more
thickly with mud and slime, until at last its struggles cease.
And then the scene changes. The old ocean disappears, and we stand,
George and I, three thousand feet above sea level, on Hay Creek, in
Logan County, among crumbling ruins of denuded and eroded chalk; and
working with pick and shovel in the burning sun, we bring the mighty
carcass once more to the light of day.
But I hope to take my readers into this field again, and will pass on
now to my expedition in the Bad Lands with Professor Cope.