CHAPTER XI. Under the Claws of a Dinosaur

UNDER THE CLAWS OF A DINOSAUR

“It seems as though my coming had brought good luck,” said Perry, joyously, when, all the baggage question settled, he started with Antoine on the trail that led to the camp at Blue Goose Gully.

“Yes, yes, it did,” answered his friend. “I should not have come into town unless it had been to meet you, and it just happened that Mr. Round-up Dick was there. We would have been most unlikely to go to No Wood Draw, and if I had not met our cowboy friend that specimen of Hyrachyus might have been lost to science forever.”

“I hope I have that same Midas touch everywhere!” the lad rejoined, exultantly.

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no,” the other warned him. “If you find specimens too easily, you will be disappointed when the months go by and you discover nothing. I was very lucky on my second day here, but I have not seen a single good specimen for the last two weeks and we are in the heart of the fossil country.”

“Cheer up, Antoine, you might drop on one any minute!”

“It is that which makes me so eager for every morning,” the young paleontologist replied. “Every day is a new day and is full of promise. And when, each day, I ride out from the camp to a point in the Bad Lands where few people have been, and where no white man has ever walked, picket my horse and start out on foot, all the spell of the explorer comes to me.

“All around is the utter silence and stillness. There is no movement of clouds in the deep blue sky, there is no leaf to rustle, no sound of falling water. The sharply carved rocks, pink, red, green and slate-gray, quiver in the sunlight. There is no sign of a life, except perhaps, a lizard darting to his hole from his basking-place on a hot rock, or the black speck of a buzzard in the sky.

“It is in a world so new and strange as this that I am searching for a world still more new and still more strange. And then, Perry, when, in the evening, the shadows turn all those glowing rocks to a deep purple and I ride home to camp, the gleam of the white tents is a great discovery that other people, too, are living in this unfamiliar world. I have felt, on seeing the tents in the distance, like Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, finding a footprint in the sand.”

“One does get a queer feeling about this kind of country,” said Perry, glancing round him. “In the Fayum, the real historic Egypt was so old that it only seemed a step back to the older fossil time, but here, the world seems unfinished, some way.”

“There is an Indian legend that Dr. Hunt told me,” said the Belgian, “which speaks of these painted deserts. It tells that the Great Spirit who made all the world found that men were crowding everywhere and that there was no place where he could walk in peace and solitude. So, in this desert he dried the rivers and the springs that none of his human children should wish to live there; he painted the rocks that they might be more beautiful and that he might have a place to brood in during the evening of the day.

“And so, quite often, Perry, when I walk up and down the silent canyons, round and round the lonely buttes, as I go climbing and scrambling in the sun, I stop and wonder if sometime I may not see a shadowy figure such as the Indians would have loved, stride across the sky.

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

MUSEUM CAMP IN WYOMING BAD LANDS.]

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

THE LARGEST OF THE TITANOTHERES.

Brontotherium, male, female and young, from the rocks of the Wyoming Bad Lands. The largest Brontotherium was almost as tall as an elephant and fourteen feet long.]

“And then, Perry, a brown stain in a rock changes the nature of the dream and the world and the life of three million years ago comes surging across my mind instead. It was when I was thus dreaming on my second day here that I found a wonderfully perfect specimen of the very first dog in America, the Procynodictis. That was worth finding.”

“Dogs as early as the Washakie formation!” exclaimed Perry in surprise. “I thought dogs were as new as bears!”

“Not in America,” Antoine answered. “The bear is a very late arrival into this country. It is possible that the Cave Man in America was here as early as the Cave Bear, although there were smaller bears in Europe long before. But Procynodictis was almost a direct ancestor of the dog, although, of course, he was a good deal like a cat, too.”

“A cat and a dog at the same time,” exclaimed Perry, laughing; “that’s mixing up the breeds, sure enough.”

“There was a regular cat-dog,” the other remarked, “and cat-dogs, such as Daphaenus, were very plentiful in America during the Oligocene Period. They had the teeth and jaws of dogs or wolves, but their claws were like those of a cat and could be drawn out and in, or partly, at least.”

“How big was the one you found, Antoine?”

“My Procynodictis was just a little larger than a domestic pussy, but with a smaller body, and longer legs. That combination of dogs’ teeth and cats’ claws should have been very effective, Perry, but I suppose it was too much of a good thing. Anyway, the cat-dogs died out, when the true cats and the true dogs came on the scene.”

“It’s queer,” said Perry thoughtfully, “how that Eocene Period seems to have been a time of mixtures.”

“It was a time of mammal branchings,” the young paleontologist reminded him, “the time when the types of to-day began to diverge. What two animals look more unlike each other to-day than a cat and an otter? Yet cat-otters, then, were as plentiful as cat-dogs. They were as big as a Hyrachyus, and considerably heavier.

“Patriofelis, who despite his name was not the father of all the cats, since the latter came from a different and smaller branch, must have been a very ugly customer, Perry. There was a good deal of the ruth of tooth and claw in those Eocene times, Perry, and an animal that wanted to escape being eaten had to keep a close lookout. And, since keeping a close lookout is a matter of brains, it is easy to see why those animals which had the least brains were the most easily eaten, and so the race became extinct.”

“Yes,” agreed Perry, “that’s true yet. If you don’t use your brains, the other fellow gets ahead of you.”

“He doesn’t exactly eat you for dinner,” said the Belgian, smiling, “but he’ll eat your dinner, or eat a dinner at your expense by making you work for him. After all, that’s the whole story of development, the quickest, the brainiest animals survived; the heavy, sluggish ones died off. Look at your friend Hyrachyus, the running rhinoceros. He was just a little heavier than the three-toed horse, so Patriofelis caught and ate him when he couldn’t catch the Mesohippus.”

“It’s like the story of a battle,” the boy replied musingly. “Here’s one small beast that eats grass, and another small beast that eats flesh. The carnivore will eat the herbivore if he can catch him. So the whole family of herbivore has to learn to run faster than his enemy. The enemy, accordingly, gets bigger. Or, perhaps, the herbivore gets arms, and the carnivore has to be more powerful, with sharper teeth and claws. And so it goes on, each developing something against the other, until beast of prey or victim becomes so big or so clumsy that he can’t develop any further. Then, since neither can ever go backward over the path of progress, either all the grass-eaters get eaten up and their race becomes extinct, or they learn how to escape from the carnivore and that race dies off because it can’t catch its dinner.”

Antoine nodded his head.

“It is a story of battle,” he said, “a battle against other animals or a battle against cold. Look how many beasts have entered into the battle with Man, Perry, and how most of them have lost! The little wild cow was wise, and, as Kipling tells, became Man’s Third Friend, and so, to-day, the cow has developed and increased, so that there is hardly a country on the globe where the cow does not live in peace and comfort. But the Buffalo of the Plains gave fight to Man, he put down his horns and shaggy mane and bellowed his defiance. And so, Perry, beneath an inch or so of prairie soil lie the bones of hundreds of thousands of buffalo, and a few half-tame herds alone remain of the vast hordes that roamed the plains and gave food and a livelihood to the Indians.”

Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

HERD CROSSING RED DEER RIVER, ALBERTA.]

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

MUSEUM BOAT CAMP ON RED DEER RIVER.

Canyon where specimens of the gigantic Albertosaurus, Saurolophus, and many other forms of giant reptiles were found.]

“But that’s a case all by itself,” the boy replied.

“No,” said Antoine, “exactly the same thing happened in Europe. There, the great wild ox, the aurochs—the urus that Cæsar speaks of—a giant bovine six feet high at the shoulder, defied man, certainly until the twelfth century, and probably a few were still alive when Columbus sailed for the New World.”

“Are there none left now?”

“Not one,” was the reply; “there are a few European bison and a few wild cattle of another species, kept in parks in Europe, but the true aurochs is gone for ever.”

“I suppose, after a while,” said Perry, mournfully, “there won’t be any wild animal left for us to hunt. When all the open land is turned into farms and all the forests are cleared and handled for lumber, then all the bears and wolves and mountain lions will be shot, and museums, a thousand years from now, will be as keen for the skeleton of a grizzly bear as we should be to-day for an aurochs.”

“Undoubtedly,” Antoine answered, “and when Africa is settled, lions and tigers, rhinoceroses and hippopotami will all go. Man has created a new age, Perry, the age of usefulness, and the only chance of survival an animal has to-day is to become a slave to Man. In order to do that, an animal has to have a good enough brain to learn. The primitive types are small-brained and will die.

“Think, Perry, if a rhinoceros could be taught to carry a load, how valuable he would be in the African jungle! But he fights Man instead, and so he must be killed. If a tiger could be trained to guard a flock of sheep, as a collie is trained, and a collie’s ancestors were wolf-like, how safe that flock would be! But the tiger cannot be trained, the whole cat tribe is treacherous. It is the big-brained dog, and the big-brained horse, and the big-brained elephant that become the friends and the servants of Man and thus win a new right to live.”

“That does seem to make Man the boss.”

“Man is the boss,” the young paleontologist agreed. “He gives the word to live or die, because his is the ruling brain of the world. Before Man came, every creature that lived was the slave to Nature, but Man is Nature’s master. I think the fossils show that,” concluded Antoine, as the tents of the Museum camp hove in sight, “for we see the world of the olden time preparing for the coming of Man.”

“And will Man, too, become extinct and some other animal take his place?”

“Some races of men have gone already,” the other answered. “The pygmies are dying fast, the last of the giant Patagonians died less than a hundred years ago, the last Tasmanian closed his race in 1876, and the flame of the North American Indian is flickering out. The skulls of the men we find in the flint beds of the Ice Age are greatly different from those of any man of to-day. Suppose, Perry, a new Age of Cold should come, all the negroes would die out. If the whole climate of the world grew hotter, so that not even the Temperate Zones were any cooler than the tropics are to-day, the white race would die out and the negro would take its place. In food alone, Man is safe, for he eats both flesh and vegetable food and has brain enough to hunt the one and to cultivate the other.”

Perry waited until Antoine had finished the sentence, then, standing on his stirrups, he waved his hat and raised a “Hello!” to his uncle, who was cantering toward the camp from another direction.

“Why, where have you been, you two rovers?” queried the professor, cheerily, as they came within speaking distance. “We expected you at lunch time. I even came into camp for lunch to be there when you arrived.”

“We met an awfully jolly cowboy and he took us to a Hyrachyus, Uncle George!” the boy burst out. “Oh, it’s a peach, standing up there in a rock just as if it were going to gallop out!”

Antoine was just as excited as the lad, and just as eager to tell the story, but his manner was less exuberant.

“I think it really is a good specimen, Dr. Hunt,” he said, “but I’m afraid it will be quite difficult to remove.”

“You think the skeleton is complete?”

“Of course,” the Belgian answered, “it’s impossible to say until the matrix is removed, but I think, from the position of the bones, that the Hyrachyus was mired, and so the complete skeleton is likely to be in place.”

“Your discovery is almost an exact duplicate of the manner in which the first known Hyrachyus was found,” the scientist remarked, “the famous specimen discovered by Cope. Evidently Hyrachyus seems to have had poor judgment in telling when a place was safe or not. A really good Hyrachyus! Yes, that’s worth while. What was the condition of the skull, Antoine?”

The younger paleontologist immediately plunged into an exact description, while Perry marveled at the amount of detailed information his friend had secured during the few moments, when, standing on the saddle, he had made a brief examination of the skull.

As the party cantered into the camp, the professor turned to his nephew and said:

“This find gives you a chance I hadn’t expected, Perry. I thought that we would leave here to-morrow, but, of course, you can’t imagine my leaving a specimen like that without looking it over! I’ll run over to-morrow with Mr. Gainman, the leader of this expedition, and you’ll have a chance to do a little riding around yourself, and get the general characteristics of this Washakie formation in your head.”

That evening after dinner, under prompting from Perry, Dr. Hunt told of his adventures in Tierra del Fuego and in the interior of Patagonia in a search for a living specimen of the giant ground-sloth, the great Megatherium, a monster twelve feet in height.

“Did you think that there were any giant sloths living still, Uncle George?” the boy asked.

“I hardly thought so,” the scientist replied, “but I hadn’t sufficient reason to disbelieve the report. All through South America there are legends of the great ground-sloth having been domesticated by Man. And, as you probably know, every once in a little while, there are fantastic stories of Mylodon, twelve feet in length, having been domesticated like cows by Primitive Man.”

“You mean that Primitive Man milked the sloth?” exclaimed Perry in amazement.

“So the story runs. But I don’t think it can be regarded as true. In the first place, the Patagonians were not very far advanced in civilization; and in the second place, the sloths are notoriously slow in brain, so that they would not be teachable. Of course, one could say that the stupidity of the sloth made them fit for domestication, because they wouldn’t know enough to resent slavery.”

“Then I should think they would have been preserved instead of dying out.”

“Very well reasoned, Perry,” said his uncle, nodding his head approvingly. “That is a most important point. If the sloth could have been domesticated like the cow, the Patagonians would have had a better chance of survival, and if the Patagonians could have raised sloths, the sloths would have survived in herds also. No, Perry, I think the South American natives must have been more anxious to kill and eat the sloths than to domesticate them, though it is almost as strange to understand how a few scattered natives, with stone-tipped spears, could have caused the extinction of a race of giant animals that had survived all the changes of several million years. For you remember, Perry, that the ancestors of the ground-sloths, such as Prepotherium, date back as far as the Miocene Period.”

“But is there any record of those huge ground-sloths having been found in South America except as fossils?” queried Perry.

“No,” the professor replied, “there is not. But that is not a sufficient reason for saying that there never is going to be. Don’t forget the okapi! And the reason that I joined that expedition to Patagonia, Perry, was because one of the universities received what seemed like sure and accurate information about a still living ground-sloth. The matter was worth investigating. It might be true.”

“Then you think it is possible, still?”

“Quite possible, but unlikely. It is equally possible that there may still be a small herd of mammoth in the unexplored region west of Hudson’s Bay, but the reports that are brought in by travelers that they have seen a living mammoth, have never been verified.

“Many scientists believe that there still may be a few giant Moas in some of the interior regions of New Zealand, but the most diligent search has failed to find any.”

“Moas were like ostriches, only bigger, weren’t they, Uncle George?”

“A very great deal bigger, and much heavier in build. Yet, less than ten years ago, a missionary reported that he had knowledge of a feast at which the Maoris, or New Zealand natives, had found, killed, and eaten a giant Moa. There’s no doubt that the Maoris used to eat the Moa, as recently as a century or two ago. Their remains have been discovered in the charred remains of camp fires. Their bones are found in thousands, lying on the surface of the ground, hardly buried at all, showing how recently they became extinct.

“In one morass, abounding in warm springs, the bones of the Moa were found in enormous numbers, layer upon layer. They are there in thousands, and the only reason for that vast horde of skeletons is, that in some terribly cold winter, or, it may be, in one of the later cycles of the Ice Age, the giant birds made their way to the warm flowing springs in the hope that their feet, at least, might be safe from the biting frost, and, undoubtedly, the warm springs made the air less bitterly cold. But there was no food there, and they perished miserably from cold and want. That may have been a long time ago. Yet, Perry, only a few years ago, a Moa egg was found in a Maori grave, tightly clasped in the bony fingers of a skeleton. None the less, that doesn’t prove that it was a new-laid egg!”

“It certainly wasn’t when it was found, if it was in a grave,” ejaculated Perry.

“Exactly. Finding an egg is no proof of its age. For example, a perfect egg of the Aepyornis—the biggest egg in the world, six times as large as an ostrich egg—was found after a hurricane, bobbing serenely up and down on the waves near St. Augustine’s Bay.”

“How in the world do you suppose it got there?”

“Probably it had been buried in a swamp,” the professor replied, “and, it may be, when the hurricane uprooted a tree, the outbursting roots tore up some of the soil and exposed an egg which had been buried in the swamp muck. The egg floated to the surface and so made its way down to the sea.”

“You said the Aepyornis egg was six times as big as the ostrich’s egg, but the bird wasn’t six times as big, was it?”

“Hardly,” said the scientist, smiling; “that would be like the Roc, that Sindbad the Sailor spoke about. But I think that the huge eggs of the Aepyornis were the things that started the story about the Roc. You know, it was supposed to have its home in Madagascar. There are several of those eggs known, and one very fine one is in America. As a matter of fact, the bird was not very much bigger than an ostrich. When you come to feathered giants, Perry, Patagonia must take the lead, and when I was down there this last winter, I found some splendid specimens.”

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

OPENING (REAR TENT) TO MOROPUS QUARRY.]

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

INSIDE THE MOROPUS QUARRY, AGATE, NEB.

Museum expert uncovering bones of a Chalicothere, a strange creature with the teeth of a rhinoceros and clawed feet, twisted like those of an ant-eater.]

“Oh, Uncle George, how big?”

“Well, I found a Brontornis, or Thunder Bird, with leg bones bigger than those of an ox, standing about eleven feet high. The drumstick was thirty inches long! That would be a bird to serve whole for a Christmas Dinner instead of a fourteen-pound turkey!”

Perry looked thoughtful.

“I’ve got a pretty good appetite,” he said, “but I think a drumstick nearly a yard long would satisfy me!”

“Even that wasn’t the strangest of my finds in Patagonia along the bird line,” his uncle continued. “Together with one of the university men I found a fairly good specimen of that queerest of fierce birds, the Phororhacus. Imagine, Perry, a bird seven feet high, with a head as big as that of a horse, and a beak ten times as big and powerful as that of an eagle. Conceive of that head and beak poised on a heavy and densely muscled neck that could strike like a thunderbolt, and I think you would agree that a blow from that ornithological pick-ax would be a good thing to dodge! In addition, you must present to yourself the idea of legs something like those of an ostrich, but more powerful and heavier, and those bore sharp tearing claws. Decidedly the Phororhacus was a bird to let strictly alone. It is hard to understand why a creature so well equipped with beak and claw perished from the earth, leaving no descendant to carry on the race.”

“None of those giant birds flew, did they, Uncle George?”

“No,” was the reply, “they were all too big for flight. About twenty feet span of wing or fifty to sixty pounds in weight seems to be Nature’s limit to the size of anything that flies.”

“That’s the size of the Pteranodon.”

“Exactly,” the professor answered, “and he was the largest of the flying reptiles. Now a bird as heavy as Phororhacus or the elephant-footed Moa would have needed a sixty-foot spread of wing. The giant birds were all flightless and they all flourished in islands and isolated places where they had few enemies. Thus, Perry, the ostriches come from Australia, the Moas from New Zealand, the Aepyornis from Madagascar and the Phororhacus from Tierra del Fuego and from South America in the period when it was isolated from the North American continent. Now in Tasmania, which is close to Australia, it happened that two carnivorous animals developed, the Tasmanian Wolf and the Tasmanian Devil. As a result, in Tasmania there are no flightless birds. When carnivores are around, the only place of safety for a bird is in the air, and since there is a limit to flight, all the successful breeds of birds are small.”

At this point Dr. Gainman, the head of the camp they were visiting and with which Antoine was working, joined the party and the conversation passed into a scientific discussion concerning the effect of geographic isolation on the development of birds, and, long before the subject had been settled, Perry had made his way to his own tent and was fast asleep.

Next morning, while Dr. Hunt and Dr. Gainman rode over to No Wood Draw, with Antoine as guide, to view the skeleton of the Hyrachyus and discuss the best means of removing it and shipping the block to New York, Perry started out alone for Haystack Butte. His ride with Round-up Dick and Antoine had given him a good idea of the country, and, on the way from the station to Blue Goose Gully, Antoine had pointed out to him its geology. Still he was surprised, when, less than an hour after leaving camp, he found himself on a well-beaten trail. Half feeling that the trail might lead in his direction, since it passed close to Haystack Butte, he followed it for a little distance. The skeleton of a horse, half buried in the soil, and, a quarter of a mile further on, the skull of an ox, made him wonder. Then, suddenly, the lad remembered a diagram in one of his old scientific books at home, showing a section of Haystack Mountain and the surrounding country, and on the diagram a winding road with the old thrilling name:

“The Overland Trail!”

Unconsciously, Perry checked his pony and looked to the westward. “The Overland Trail!” Over that trail how many emigrant trains had passed! On the long prairie stretches how many bands of hostile Indians had been fought; over the Bad Lands in which he was riding, how many emigrants had died, the men gaunt and footsore, the women weak and starved. “The Overland Trail!” No three words in all the language tell a grimmer story of American History, no three words hold more gallantry or more adventure.

It was with a jerk that Perry pulled himself back to reality again and turned to the left from the old trail, towards the low slopes of that butte which is dignified by the name of Haystack Mountain. It took a sharp eye to distinguish between the two levels of rock, of which the distinguishing characters had been explained to Perry by Antoine, but the boy read his way correctly. Rounding one of the small erosion buttes he reached the point where one of the parties from the camp was engaged in uncovering an Eobasileus or Loxolophodon skeleton that had been discovered a week or two before.

Perry called to remembrance the rhyme his uncle had told him quoting the scornful remarks of the Loxolophodon to the aspiring Eohippus, and he smiled. He tethered his pony, and boy-like, clambered to the very top of Haystack Butte, beneath the cap of which the Eobasileus skeleton had been found. He spent the day happily roaming around the country, learning the lie of the rocks from the clues that had been given him by Antoine.

Next day, with his uncle, the boy started north for the Grey Bull River country to review the Lower Eocene Beds. Perry thought he knew his geology fairly well, but he had not the slightest idea that there could be as much excitement in a mere ride through that country with some one who was as expert as the professor. The finding of each new rock was like the finding of a new wild animal, and Perry aptly described the ride as “gunning for strata!”

The trip through the Puerco and Torrejon regions of New Mexico was also a delight to the boy, but as their researches took them further and further down the rock levels and they grew nearer and nearer to the level where the giant reptiles could be found, all the great wonder revived, and at night, in his tent, Perry dreamed again and again that he was on the back of the unicorn, speeding through that Jurassic world of giant dinosaurs. At last, the New Mexico strata sufficiently studied, the two took the train back for Wyoming once more. They picked up their ponies at the nearest station to the reptile beds and a little later stopped at an abandoned sod cabin that had been used by the Museum expedition several years before when taking out specimens from the Bone Cabin quarry.

“There, Perry,” said the professor, pointing to the ruins of a small building on a hillock at the end of the valley not far from the sod cabin, “is the most marvelous fossil spot in the world. It is famous to every scientist and will be famous forever.”

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

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.”

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

UNEARTHING A SAUROLOPHUS SKELETON.

Crested dinosaur of the Cretaceous period, allied to Trachodon, skull seen in foreground.]

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

UNEARTHING A DIPLODOCUS HIND LIMB.

Amphibious dinosaur of the Jurassic Period, found at Big Bone Cabin quarry.]

“I can see how that would be,” the boy exclaimed, “I didn’t cut my Pteranodon entirely away from the rock, and just to get it partly cleared away was an awful job.”

“Mounting that big skeleton was unbelievably hard,” the professor continued. “No museum had ever before attempted to mount so large a fossil skeleton, and you see, Perry, the bones were so fragile that they could not even bear their own weight, much less the weight of the skeleton. Nearly every separate bone had to be specially treated and hardened so as to be rigid. Then came the question as to the way in which the bones were to be articulated together. No one had ever seen a living Brontosaurus, of course, and so there was no guide as to what he looked like. The bones were there, but bones aren’t a safe guide by themselves.”

“I don’t see why not,” remarked Perry.

“Suppose you found the bones of a frog, but no one had ever seen a frog or anything that looked like one! You might set the animal up with those long doubled-up legs quite straight, so that he would look as though he were on stilts.”

“That would sure make a queer-looking beast,” said Perry, laughing.

“Exactly. So, in order to get an idea of the way the bones must have been during life, we dissected and studied nearly every living reptile, especially the alligators and the lizards, and worked out the muscles of almost all of them. Then the corresponding bones in the Brontosaurus were compared, and the position and size of the muscles worked out, as far as they could be judged from the notches and grooves still preserved on the bones.”

“My word, that’s real work!”

“You can be sure it was real work,” the professor assured him. “Then, Perry, we articulated the skeleton loosely, and the position and size of each muscle were judged from strips of paper we pasted on the bones to represent the muscles. As we moved the joints, we watched the paper move, and compared the movement of the paper with the muscles of the living reptiles. When we got the limbs into the proper places, the whole question of the weight and pose of the body, as it must have been in life, was worked out, and finally the skeleton was mounted in what must have been the characteristic position that the Brontosaurus assumed during life. That took us another three years. It was not until three years later, or six years altogether, that the Brontosaurus skeleton was finally mounted.”

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

BRONTOSAURUS IN HIS NATIVE SWAMP.

Huge reptile of ten million years ago, weighing not less than 38 tons, seventy feet long, once a widely spread American species.]

“Meantime, Uncle George, I suppose you had found the Bone Cabin quarry,” said the boy, anxious to bring his uncle back to the story of the discovery.

“We first found that quarry in the autumn of the year we began work on the Como Bluffs,” the professor replied. “One of our fellows was doing a little prospecting over the plains, as we felt we had exhausted the Como Bluffs specimens that had been exposed so far. Now, if you remember, Perry, as we rode out here this afternoon, we sighted the Laramie Mountains and the Freeze Out Hills and I pointed out to you that they were quite recent in origin. As those ranges were uplifted, they crushed together the surface of the level plains and crumpled them into rock waves. Erosion cut away the tops of those waves and exposed the rock at the edges, though, of course, the lower parts of these rock waves are still underground and it will take the erosion of many centuries to expose them. The bone-hunters of the future will find more treasures waiting for them on the Laramie Plains, just as we have done.

“You remember, Perry, I showed you the irregularities of the bone layer. At the place where you started up that prong-horn antelope to-day, the bone layer was level, and that little gully where you retrieved that sage chicken you shot, just before dinner, was the trough of one of those rock waves. The Laramie Plains are like a huge graveyard of the giant saurians which has been crumpled like a sheet of paper. So, when we had almost finished with the Como Bluffs, we decided to prospect across the plains, watching carefully for each place that might be the top of one of these waves, and therefore might be an exposure of the fossil-bearing fresh-water rock.

“As the second in command of our party was riding over the plains, keeping a sharp lookout for the characteristic lie of the land, he noticed a little hillock. Not being a part of the usual wave formation, it did not strike him forcibly, but, in riding past, he noticed a number of brownish masses that looked like sandstone concretions. Brown sandstone is not plentiful in that region, so he looked a little more closely.

“Suddenly he pulled up with a jerk. There, at least, was something that was not sandstone! A less experienced eye would have passed the boulder by, but the Museum expert was too keen a man not to have quick perception. Another, and another and yet another! He hopped off his pony, dropped the reins, and came to the hillock.

“The entire mound was made of dinosaur bones!

“All the dark-brown boulders were the remains of ponderous fossils which had slowly washed out from a great dinosaur bed beneath. The bones had been so thickly strewn that they had held the soil together against erosion. The explorer climbed the little hillock, and there, near the top, was the abandoned dugout foundation of a shanty that some Mexican herder had built there many a year ago. It was a shallow cellar, only a few feet deep.

“The foundation was lined with a wall of fossil bones! These huge petrified blocks which the herder had only thought of as stones and used as a base for his shanty, were treasures that are now of incalculable value to the scientific world. To the trained eye, this hillock was like a sign-post slowly erected by Nature during millions of years to point the way to the great cemetery below where the most gigantic of her children lay buried.

“It was in the late spring of next year that I came on the scene. The hillock was a mass of glowing color. Wild flowers were blooming everywhere. The cacti were in full blossom, and the dwarf bushes of the desert were in the few weeks of their greenness. Half-hidden amid the flowers and the cacti were these brown boulders which had been found to be bones.

“All the three great kinds of dinosaurs were there, Perry. The bones of the huge Brontosaurus and Camarasaurus lay beneath that hillock of the great army of Amphibious Dinosaurs, those monsters with blunt pointed teeth and blunt claw, with limbs and feet like elephants, unarmored five toed, with long neck and small head; only the most tremendous of them, the Brachiosaurus, was missing. These Amphibious Dinosaurs were the largest creatures that ever trod the world, Perry, and their bulk was too great for them to have lived any other than a marsh life, when the buoyancy of the water in part sustained the weight of their enormous bodies.

“The Beaked Dinosaurs were in that Bone Cabin hillock and in the beds below by dozens. There were two or three species of the Camptosaurus, one quite small, only three or four feet high, another six or seven feet high, but both of them much smaller than their gigantic relative, the Iguanodon, which lived about the same time in Western Europe. There were those super-dreadnoughts of the dinosaur world, the short-legged Stegosaurus, built for impregnable defense, with feet like elephants, short neck, small head, and a body and tail armored with massive bony plates and large spines.”

“Ah,” said Perry, remembering his dream, “it was a Stegosaur that saved me!”

His uncle stared at him, not in the least understanding the remark, but continued:

“Then, too, there were carnivorous dinosaurs of two kinds, one a small agile beast, Ornitholestes, some six feet in length, and the other the terrible Allosaurus, a giant flesh eater, thirty-eight feet long, with bird-like feet and huge jaws armed with pointed teeth sharp as a knife and great curved talons. Not only did we find the skulls and skeletons of these beasts, but also significant evidence of their habits. The bones of the herbivorous dinosaurs, even of the Brontosaurus, were not uncommonly scored with the tooth-marks of the Allosaurus, whose broken-off teeth sometimes lay beside them in the quarry. So you see that among these Jurassic Dinosaurs there was the same division into hunters and prey that one sees everywhere in Nature. There, as everywhere else, the hunters developed weapons for attack—teeth and claws; while the hunted animals either developed some kind of armor or weapons of defense; others, again, developed means of speed for flight from their foes, or retreated to some inaccessible place for safety. The carnivora, in turn, were trying out improvements in method of capturing and attacking their prey.”

“Same old fight!” exclaimed the boy.

“You can see the fight even more impressively in the Cretaceous Period, some millions of years later than the Bone Cabin dinosaurs. By that time the huge but clumsy and helpless amphibious dinosaurs had become extinct. The unarmored Camptosaurus, Iguanodonts and their relatives had taken to the water as swimmers rather than waders, and had become the Duck-billed dinosaurs, with rows of small teeth behind a duck-like bill, web feet and a powerful swimming tail.

Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

TRACHODON, A DUCK-BILLED DINOSAUR.

Reptile, sixteen feet high, alarmed by the approach of a huge carnivorous Tyrannosaurus, ready to plunge into the water for safety.]

“The armored dinosaurs had developed stronger armor, while another group had devised a novel and most extraordinary protection, a huge buckler over the head and tremendous horns over the eyes and on top of the nose. There were the Horned Dinosaurs, with their huge heads. One of these, Triceratops, he of the three-horned face, had a neck with an enormous bony frill like the spiked collar that some bulldogs wear, as well as his threatening horns. He was a powerful beast, Perry, this Triceratops, and must have been able to hold his own against the terrible carnivorous dinosaurs that threatened every moment of their lives.”

“Were they as big?”

“Yes, bigger and far more menacing. Tyrannosaurus, the Tyrant Saurian, was perhaps the fiercest creature that ever drew breath upon the earth. He reached a length of forty-seven feet and stood twenty feet high, standing upon his huge hind legs. His head was more than four feet long and his deep jaws bore a grim array of tearing six-inch teeth. The hind legs, though larger than those of elephants, had feet like those of birds, with sharp ripping claws, and the forefeet were clawed like the talons of an eagle.”

“Not much chance if a thing like that got after you,” the boy ejaculated.

“It would be a mistake, though, Perry,” his uncle warned him, “to imagine even the Tyrannosaurus as swift or active. An animal larger than an elephant, with a tiny reptile brain, smaller than a man’s clenched fist, could never have leapt or sprung upon a foe, but must have advanced with a heavy lumbering run. There came the value, my boy, of the great massive defense of Triceratops, the three-horned, for while that heavy head with the neck collar of plates would have been of little value against a small, swift enemy, it might easily impale the ponderous Tyrannosaurus as he ran fiercely though clumsily onward to the fight. They were slow and deadly fighters, Perry, those giant reptiles of old, and probably, every meeting meant the death of one or both, and was ended with the first or second grapple.”

“I wish we could see one of those fights between two scrappy monster Saurians, anyway,” the boy said wistfully.

“That is past wishing for,” the scientist replied, “all we can hope for is to study the way they must have fought. Perhaps, Perry, if we should find some specimens of the great carnivorous dinosaurs, the Museum may be able to mount them in the attitude of fighting, and thus, ten million years after their death, they will thrill the world of men, when, during all their lifetime, they had no audience to applaud nor any spectators to terrorize.”

The following day, and for many days thereafter, Perry prospected with his uncle throughout the Laramie Plains. He stood in the old Bone Cabin Quarry, he saw the thousands of bones that still lie at the base of the Como Bluffs, he followed eagerly and anxiously the various rock waves of the plains. Many and many a fossil he found. Indeed, there was hardly a day that he did not return to camp with news of some discovery, but always the professor found that it was a common specimen, or one of which there were more complete skeletons known. Yet, as Antoine reminded him, each day held new promise.

On the very last day but one of the time allotted for their stay, Perry decided to ride out in a different direction. His uncle had said that some time in the future he intended to do some prospecting near the Freeze Out Hills, and Perry, remembering that the Bone Cabin quarry had been found almost by accident, started out early that morning for the longest ride he had undertaken by himself. The day was hot and sultry, but the lad had a curious elation.

“I feel it in my bones that I’m going to find something to-day!” he had said to his uncle before leaving.

Noon came before he had reached the desired point, but the rock formations began to look familiar, more like those in which he had been working for the past three weeks, and so, though he was far from camp, Perry went riding onward still, knowing he would be late in returning, but buoyed up by the feeling that the fates had something good in store.

His senses were keenly awake, the green and pink striped rocks seemed to beckon him on. He felt as though the impossible might happen, as though one of the great dinosaurs might stride out, as in life, from behind some of the fantastically carved buttes on either hand. A jack rabbit, suddenly leaping along a dry ravine, brought his heart in his mouth with a jump. A stumble of his cow-pony changed the current of his thoughts and made him realize that he had not stopped for dinner, nor given his pony any water since breakfast.

Dismounting on the instant, he slung out the canteen, and, finding a slightly hollowed rock in a shadowed place where it had not been turned to blister-heat by the sun, gave his pony a drink and a handful of oats. He took out his own sandwiches and idly tossed a crumb to a lizard basking on a rock hard by. The little brown creature snatched the crumb, and with a flicker of his tail, disappeared. Idly, his lunch over, Perry followed where the lizard had gone and stooped down to look into the hole.

“If a chap could only multiply that lizard by about a hundred times,” he said to himself, “it wouldn’t be so awfully far from a Diplodocus. A hundred times as long—”

He stopped.

“A hundred times—”

What was that queer exposure in the rock?

He rubbed his eyes. Remembering that Antoine had warned him of the strange appearances that seemed to come in the glare of those painted rocks, he turned away and looked into the shadow. Then, hardly daring to trust his eyes, he walked over quietly and softly to a long, low mound, from three inches to a foot above the surface, which ran along the edge of a small gully.

A long broken line of weathered bone met his gaze.

Feverishly, hardly daring yet to believe that it might be true, he fell on his knees beside the bones, and with his small geological pick, began to clear away the rock, half hopefully, half fearfully seeking to make sure. The rock was fairly soft. Soon, at the end nearest to him, one of the larger bones showed clear, as the sun and weather had cracked the rock around it.

Chip, chip, chip!

The minutes and the hours passed, but the boy, down beside the brown bones on the ground, knew nothing of the time. Forty feet away, the pony plucked at the scanty herbage, but Perry never took his eyes off from the ground. The rock was not hard, and was sufficiently rotted to break under the pick, and by fractions of an inch the bones grew clearer.

Chip! Chip! Chip!

Over the mountains to the westward the sun began to fall, the shimmering heat of the desert cleared and the distant buttes glowed purple. But, though the boy’s arm was aching and his back was stiff from long stooping, he was as unwitting of the pain as of the waning light, and the blows of the little hammer came down with ceaseless regularity, telling the strokes of doom that should bring some monstrous creature from its ten-million-year-old grave.

Chip! Chip! Chip!

The rim of the sun had touched the further hills, when, still in a daze, the boy straightened up and looked at what he had uncovered. Small though was the head, fragmentary as was the amount of rock he had removed, he added hope and imagination to knowledge and envisioned the whole. The monstrous length of neck which he felt sure must be the meaning of those slight outcrops hinted a colossal story. He paced the whole line of the skeleton.

One! Two! Three!—Thirty-four paces! One hundred and two feet! It could not be!

But, returning his steps, the paces came to the same.

Perry looked at the sky and knew that it was evening. Carefully he had watched his landmarks as he rode, but too many people had told him of the dangers of being lost in the Bad Lands for him to dare to try to make his way home. Still, he might make a start.

Back to his pony went the boy, and, before mounting, he looked round once again to see the great mushroom-capped butte that was his homeward guide. He could see it nowhere! And, while he watched, he saw shapes that had been quite familiar in the daylight change under the quickly fading dusk. There was no help for it, he must stay the night through and wait until the morning to find his way back to camp.

But the giant skeleton lured him again, and, a few moments later, he was on his knees again beside that ancient saurian, and the strokes of the hammer fell throbbing across the silence of a night in the Bad Lands.

Chip! Chip! Chip!

Far away in the distance, where perhaps some slight vegetation came down from the hills, for he was on the very edge of the desert country, came the long-drawn howl of a coyote. For a second the hammer hung poised, then fell again, beating, beating through the night.

He knew that to expose such a skeleton would mean the work of a month or two for several men, probably with the aid of dynamite, but he was determined at least to bring an inch or two, clear. The chill star-shine gave him light enough, but though the day had been so hot, the night was cold. He piled a heap of sage-brush and mesquite and lit a fire. Then, unable to leave his find, back he went to the skeleton again.

Chip! Chip! Chip!

Courtesy of J. B. Lippincott & Co.

A BRACHIOSAUR, LARGEST OF ALL LAND CREATURES.

Restoration of Gigantosaurus, from East Africa, closely related to the American genus Brachiosaurus (restoration based on incomplete knowledge and is much exaggerated, since, though bulkier, it probably was not longer than the Diplodocus, correct scientific restoration awaits setting-up of skeleton now in Berlin): a Diplodocus, which previously held the record for size, shown to the left; also, for comparison, the figure of a man is drawn in, though, of course, Gigantosaurus lived at least eight million years before the first man. From Gregory, in “Geology of To-day.”]

Little by little the form of the huge creature began to appear to him. This tiny fragment of rock grew huge to his tired eyes. Longer than a Diplodocus, bigger than a Brontosaur, the hundred feet and more of the mighty monarch of the past stretched out upon the plain, stretched as it had fallen for the last sleep on the borders of that lake ten million years ago.

The cold stole into the boy’s bones, and his fingers were so weary that he could scarcely hold the hammer. He piled the fire high again, and went back to his work. But the strokes fell slowly now, and the beating of the hammer in the night was labored and irregular. The high-heaped fire sent its beacon gleam against the sky and showed the shadow of the boy, striving the long night through to bring the giant of the past to light.

Chip!... Chip!...

The hammer fell aimlessly. Ineffectively the boy made an attempt to raise it, but his fingers were nerveless. He swayed once, twice, then fell forward on his hands across the Titan, sunk in the sleep of exhaustion.

As the dawn broke, three riders, at full speed, guided by the light of the fire, came dashing down the ravine, and the first rays of the rising sun showed them the boy asleep, pillowed on the outcrop of a Brachiosaurus, which later quarrying was to prove one of the finest of its kind.

“Some paleontologist!” said the professor, and laid his overcoat over the sleeping boy.

THE END

U. S. SERVICE SERIES

By FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER

Illustrations from photographs taken in work for U. S. Government

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Transcriber’s Notes

pg 35 Changed: volume before him was indelibily to: volume before him was indelibly

pg 193 Changed: ejaculated Perry in suprise to: ejaculated Perry in surprise

pg 297 Changed: pony’s neck in the exuberence to: pony’s neck in the exuberance

pg 308 Changed: the real historic Egpt to: the real historic Egypt

pg 308 Changed: down the silent canons to: down the silent canyons

pg 324 Changed: Decidedly the Phororachus was a bird to: Decidedly the Phororhacus was a bird

pg 325 Changed: best means of removing it and shiping to: best means of removing it and shipping