I may begin this closing chapter by mentioning some other specimens which I have discovered, or which my sons have, for, thank God, I have raised up a race of fossil hunters. My second son, Charles M. Sternberg, has in his person recently fulfilled a dream of forty years of my own, by discovering the most complete skeleton known of Professor Marsh’s great toothed-bird, Hesperornis regalis, the Royal Bird of the West. Unfortunately the skull is missing, otherwise the nearly complete skeleton is present, and strange to say in normal position, showing that Dr. F. A. Lucas is right in his restoration of the Martin specimen as mounted in the National Museum, i. e., as a loon, a diver instead of a wader, as had been supposed. Our specimen, however, shows a much longer neck than he had imagined. Strange indeed was this long-necked diver with its tarsus at right angles with the body and its powerful web-footed feet. The body was narrow, a little over four inches wide, with a backbone like the keel of a boat. The head was ten inches long and armed with sharp teeth. By keeping the body horizontal it could explore a column of water six feet high and wide, for any unfortunate fish within the zone of its activity. I would name this great loon the Snake-Bird of the Niobrara Group. This specimen I longed to find for so many years, but was glad to give the credit to my son. It is to be mounted in the American Museum, and I picture it as it left my laboratories (Fig. 41).

A word also about that great flying machine of the Cretaceous, the flying lizard Pteranodon. The skeleton and a very fine skull, which my son found on Hackberry Creek in 1906, is now mounted in the British Museum, where my warm friend Dr. A. Smith Woodward assures me “my specimens are greatly admired.”

Especially have I been fortunate in the Kansas Chalk where my son, George Fryer, has charge as I write these lines of my twentieth expedition to those beds, and where he has discovered, and safely collected and shipped to my laboratory, a great plate of the beautiful stemless Crinoid Uintacrinus socialis. I sent one section to Professor M. Boule, of the National Natural History Museum of France, at Paris. Hundreds of these rare animals are represented in this slab (Fig. 42).

Before these pages go to press, and a year after I began work on them, I am pleased to be able to tell my readers of two noble specimens of the Pleistocene Age I have just secured from the plains of Kansas, that great treasure house of the animals of the past. One is a majestic Bison, whose head towering above that of his fellows supported a pair of horn cores measuring six feet from tip to tip. Along the curve the distance is eight feet. The length of the head is two feet, the distance between the horns sixteen inches, and from the center of the orbits, one foot. These splendid horn cores were uncovered through a fortunate chance. It seems that the Missouri Pacific Railway, wishing to shorten the creek in the vicinity of Hoxie, Sheridan County, Kansas, cut a new right-of-way for it across a bend. Their excavation came within two feet of the bones buried below, thirty-five feet from the surface of the earth; a friendly freshet washed them out, and they were discovered by Mr. Frank Lee and Harley Henderson, of Hoxie, Kansas, June 15, 1902. I was so fortunate as to secure them in June, 1908. I have filled them with white shellac, and they are now in condition to be preserved always, a specimen of the grand old bison of the Pleistocene time. Now their burial places are three thousand feet nearer the stars than the day they were buried there, as then the climate was semi-tropical and the land they roamed over near sea level. The largest pair of horn cores of a similar bison are preserved in the Cincinnati Natural History Museum. I copy from one of their records: “The most conspicuous figure on Plate IX, with immense horn cores, is of the long extinct broad-fronted bison. This specimen, by far the finest of its kind in existence, is the greatest prize in the Cincinnati Museum. It was found in 1869 on Brush Creek, Brown County, Ohio, and through the efforts of Dr. O. D. Norton it was acquired by the Museum in 1875.” It gives me great pleasure to show my readers a photograph of the Kansas form that measures along the curve of the horn cores a foot and a half more than the famous Ohio specimen. (Fig. 43.)

The great Columbian Elephant, whose jaw I illustrate and have still in my possession, represents one of the largest, or the largest, of its kind ever discovered. It was found near the town of Ness City, in Ness County, Kansas. This giant lived at the same time the great Bison existed. The last molars have pushed out the worn premolars and the other two molars, and occupy the entire jaw, having a grinding surface of 5 × 9 inches. The lower parts of the teeth flare out like a fan, and measure twenty inches along the top of the roots. The greatest circumference of the jaws is 26½ inches, and the length 32 inches. Unfortunately, the articulations are worn away, likely by rolling in some river bed. I secured this noble representative of American Elephants in June, 1908 (Fig. 44).

How rich are the strata that compose the earth’s crust only a fossil hunter can fully realize. Take, for instance, western Kansas, where the soil beneath our feet is one vast cemetery. I know of a ravine in Logan County which cuts through four great formations. The lower levels, of reddish and blue chalk, are filled with the remains of swimming lizards, with the wonderful Pteranodonts, the most perfect flying machines ever known, with the toothed bird Hesperornis, the royal bird of the West, and the fish-bird Ichthyornis, with fish-like biconcave vertebrÆ, with fishes small and great (one form over sixteen feet long), and huge sea-tortoises. Above are the black shales of the Fort Pierre Cretaceous, thousands of feet of which are exposed in the bad lands of the upper Missouri. In this formation the dinosaurs reign supreme. Still higher are the mortar beds of the Loup Fork Tertiary, where the dominant type changes from reptiles to mammals. Here, in western Kansas, are found great numbers of the short-limbed rhinoceros, the large land-turtle, Testudo orthopygia, several inferior tusked mastodons, the saber-toothed tiger, the three-toed horse, and a deer only about eighteen inches high. Higher still, where the grass roots shoot down to feed on the bones, are the Columbian mammoth, the one-toed horse, like our species of to-day, a camel like our South American llama, and a bison far larger than the present species.

The living bison has become almost extinct itself, through the agency of man. And in the layer of soil which covers all these formations, an old arrowhead and the crumbling bones of a modern buffalo give an object lesson in the manner in which these relics of the earlier world have been preserved. So races of animals, as of men, reach their highest state of development, retrograde, and give place to other races, which, living in the same regions, obey the same laws of progress.

My readers will be pleased, I am sure, to know that just before these pages go to press I am permitted to tell the story of our last great hunt in Converse County, Wyoming, during July, August, and September, 1908, for the largest skull of any known vertebrate, the great three-horned dinosaur, Triceratops (Fig. 45). Only thirteen good specimens are known to American museums, 7 of which are in Yale University Museum, and were collected, I believe, by J. B. Hatcher. From his field notes Mr. Hatcher has made a map of this region with crosses to indicate the localities in which skulls have been found, and 30 are so indicated, but I soon learned that he noted broken and poor material, as well as the more perfect. With my three sons I entered the region with enthusiasm on the hunt for one of these skulls for the British Museum of Natural History.

I was not employed by that institution, but the agreement was, in case I secured a good specimen, it was to go to them. I must acknowledge I felt rather dubious when Dr. Osborn of the American Museum wrote me that he had had parties in these beds four years, searching without success for a specimen. For weeks and weeks we four examined every bit of exposed rock in vain. The rock consisted of clay and sandstone, the latter both massive and cross-bedded. Scattered through the great deposits of sandstone were peculiar-shaped masses of very hard flinty rock, with the same physical characteristics but with superior hardness. These added strange forms to the land sculptury. Almost every form the mind can imagine is found here, from colonies of giant mushrooms, to human faces so startling as to secure instant attention from the observer. (Figs. 38 and 39.)

A general view of the country from an elevated butte shows many cone-like mounds, resembling table mountains or even haystacks in the hazy distance! As the rocks, and even the flint-like material, readily disintegrate, the creeks that run east into the Cheyenne River soon radiate like the rays of a fan and deeply scar the narrow divides into rather deep canyons and narrow ravines. Perhaps a thousand feet of these fresh-water beds, are laid down in a basin surrounded, on all sides, by the marine, Fort Pierre, and Fox Hills Cretaceous.

Buck Creek on the south, Cheyenne River on north and east, and a line through the mouth of Lightning Creek would roughly give the area of the Laramie Beds we explored. They cover about a thousand square miles. Here in a country given up entirely to cattle and sheep ranges with but little of the country fenced, meeting no one but now and then a lonely sheep herder, my tribe of fossil hunters entered with bounding hope that we might find some of these famous dinosaurs.

Here is the border land between the Age of Reptiles and of Mammals, where mammals first appear as small marsupials. We secured several teeth of these early mammals. Day after day hoping against hope we struggled bravely on. Every night the boys gave answer to my anxious inquiry, What have you found? Nothing. Often we ran out of palatable food, as we were 65 miles from our base, and did not always realize how our appetites would be sharpened by our miles of tramping over the rough hills and ravines. One day in August, Levi and I started in our one-horse buggy to a camp we had made near the cedar hills on Schneider Creek. As we passed a small exposure which I had not gone over, I left him to drive and went over the beds of reddish shale, the remnant of an old peat-bog. I found the end of a horn core of Triceratops, and further excavation showed I had stumbled upon the burial place of one of these rare dinosaurs. How thankful we were that after so much useless labor we had at last secured the great object of our hunt. It will prove a beautiful skull when prepared and mounted under the direction of Dr. Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology in the British Museum, where so many of my discoveries have gone.

Unfortunately the skull was somewhat broken up, and one horn core is missing. But one side of the face with the large horn core, the back of the head, and the great posterior crest, seems entire, as well as large pieces of the other side of the face, and a fine specimen will be made of it. The total length of the skull is 6 feet 6 inches. The horn core over the eye is 2 feet 4 inches high; while the circumference in the middle is 2 feet 8 inches, and it is 15 inches in diameter at the base.

This was a fully matured animal. As the bony ossicles of the head armature are co-ossified with the margin and remain as undulations more or less sharply defined, I am inclined to believe that they are ornaments. They might assist a little in defense but not offense.

In the mean time my oldest son, George, told me of a region he had explored a half-mile from our camp near the head of a ravine. Here we had found a natural cistern full of rain-water, protected from the sun and cattle by a couple of great concretion-like masses of rock that covered it. Over the divide where I had found the great skull, between Boggy and the breaks of Schneider near its mouth in Cheyenne River, George took Levi and myself. The evening before, I took the skull in to Lusk for shipment. George pointed out a locality in which he had found a bone-bed, where we later secured many teeth of reptiles and fishes, scales of ganoid fishes, bones of small dinosaurs and crocodiles and the beautifully sculptured shells of turtles, Trionyx, etc. As there was still a tract of a few hundred yards to be explored the two boys started to go over it, while I went to the bone-bed. They soon joined me with the information that they had found some bones sticking out of a high escarpment of sandstone. George had found part of the specimen in one place and Levi another part soon afterwards. I requested George to carefully uncover the floor on which the bones lay.

While we were taking in our skull, George and Levi ran nearly out of provisions, and the last day of our absence lived on boiled potatoes. But in spite of this they had removed a mass of sandstone 12 feet wide, 15 feet deep, and 10 feet high.

Shall I ever experience such joy as when I stood in the quarry for the first time, and beheld lying in state the most complete skeleton of an extinct animal I have ever seen, after forty years of experience as a collector! The crowning specimen of my life work!

A great duck-billed dinosaur, a relative of Trachodon mirabilis, lay on its back with front limbs stretched out as if imploring aid, while the hind limbs in a convulsive effort were drawn up and folded against the walls of the abdomen. The head lay under the right shoulder. One theory might be that he had fallen on his back into a morass, and either broken his neck or had been unable to withdraw his head from under his body, and had choked to death or drowned. If this was so the antiseptic character of the peat-bog had preserved the flesh until, through decay, the contents of the viscera had been replaced with sand. It lay there with expanded ribs as in life, wrapped in the impressions of the skin whose beautiful patterns of octagonal plates marked the fine sandstone above the bones. George had cut away the rock, leaving enough to give the impression that even the flesh was replaced by sandstone, giving an exact picture of him, as he breathed his last some five million of years ago.

A more probable explanation, judging from the shape of the skin outline which covers the abdomen and is sunken into the body cavity at least a foot, is that the great creature died in the water. The gases forming in the body floated the carcass, which was then carried by currents to the final burial place. When the gases escaped, the skin collapsed and occupied their place; the carcass sank head first and feet upward, the former dragging under the shoulder as the body came to rest on the mud of the bottom.

Quite different indeed is this grand example of extinct life from the one restored and of which an ideal picture is given in this book (Fig. 46). In the first place, in the specimen we discovered the ribs are expanded, the great chest cavity measuring 18 inches deep, 24 inches long, and 30 inches wide. I have no doubt but that with lungs expanded to their full capacity, he often swam across streams of water in the tropical jungle in which he lived and died. Further, the front limbs are not mere arms, that never touched the ground, but were used in locomotion, as there are toes with hoof-bones, not so large as those of the hind feet but with the same pattern, and a divergent thumb, that had a round bone for its ungual. Consequently the animal could use the front feet as clumsy hands to hold down the limb of a tree from which he was cropping the tender foliage, or banners of moss. There were three powerful hoofs on each hind foot.

I do not question, in the presence of this individual, which is complete excepting the hind feet, tail and left tibia and fibula, but that the reptile often stood erect, supporting his ponderous weight while feeding on the leaves of the forest. But when it walked it used its front limbs as well. A remarkable character are the countless rods of solid bone that lay along the backbone in the flesh, and appear like ossified tendons similar to those in the leg of a turkey. Hundreds of ossified rods appeared, row after row, shaped like Indian beads, as thick as a lead pencil in the center and beveled off to a small round point. It has occurred to me that these were for defense; that when a great Tyrannosaurus rex leaped on his back, his powerful claws found no lodgment in the flesh on account of these bony rods that could not be penetrated. Thus our dinosaur would shake off his enemy.

How wonderful are the works of an Almighty hand! The life that now is, how small a fraction of the life that has been! Miles of strata, mountain high, are but the stony sepulchers of the life of the past.

How rapidly has the field expanded which I entered as a pioneer some forty years ago! In 1867 I knew only five paleontologists—Agassiz, Lesquereux, Marsh, Cope, and Leidy, with but few followers; while to-day, Harvard, Princeton, the American, the Carnegie, the Field, and the National Museums have all built up great collections of the animals and plants of the past, and the number of publications on fossil animals has reached an enormous total.

I had the pleasure of attending the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that met in the American Museum in New York at the mid-winter session in 1906. Professor Osborn introduced me to his splendid Head Preparator, Mr. Hermann, who has mounted the skeletons of the great Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, and so many other examples of extinct animals. Mr. Hermann was requested by the Professor to devote all his spare time to showing me anything the exhibition and storerooms contained, prepared or unprepared, and to do all in his power to make my visit pleasant. I certainly felt at home in that paradise of ancient animals, many of which I had collected for science on my own explorations. The magnificent halls in which they are exhibited are a wonderful tribute paid by the wealth and intelligence of the citizen of Greater New York to science. How admirable that Mr. Jesup should use his private fortune as the means to take from the obscurity of the private dwelling of the late Professor Cope his great collection, to which I was a contributor for eight years; and he has placed it under Professor Henry F. Osborn, who with the assistance of Drs. J. L. Wortman, W. D. Matthew, and others, has brought order out of chaos and presented in intelligible shape not only that collection but many others from the fossil fields of the West.

It is a glorious thought to me that I have lived to see my wildest dreams come true, that I have seen stately halls rise to be graced with many of the animals of the past that lived in countless thousands, and that I have had the pleasure of securing some of the treasures, in the shape of complete skeletons, which now adorn those halls.

I stood on Columbia Heights that same year of 1906, and my heart swelled with pride when I looked down on that teeming metropolis and remembered that I too was a native of the Empire State. Then I thought of my distant prairie state of Kansas, and gloried in the thought that the best years of my life had been spent in her ancient ocean and lake beds, those old cemeteries of creation.

That past life, at least a very small fraction of it, I have sought to bring before my readers with pen pictures. We have men among us who can put their conceptions of the ancient inhabitants of land and sea and air on canvas, and among them are Mr. Charles R. Knight, of the American Museum, and Mr. Sidney Prentice, of the Carnegie Museum. Mr. Prentice I knew as a boy, and he has done me the honor to assure me that my words of counsel have done something at least toward assisting him to make the choice of following the work not only of an artist in a paleontological museum, but in portraying with pencil and brush the ideal pictures of the early denizens of earth as in life. His success is shown in his restorations of Clidastes. The results of Mr. Knight’s restorations of many of the extinct animals brighten my pages, thanks to my friend Professor Henry F. Osborn, so if I have failed in my pen pictures to take my readers into the misty past, these brilliant restorations will certainly have the desired effect.

I cannot hope in this short space to have given more than a passing glance at the life of a fossil hunter. It has been one of joy to me; I should not like to have missed making the discoveries I have made, and I would willingly undergo the same hardships to accomplish the same results. And if my story does anything to interest people in fossils, I shall feel that I have not written in vain.

When I requested Professor William K. Gregory of Columbia University to be the final reader of the manuscript of this book, “The Life of a Fossil Hunter,” shall I ever forget his kind words? “I hope you will not feel that you are under any personal obligations whatever, because this slight service is simply laid upon me by the necessities of the case, i. e., by the fact that your whole life and work have placed all paleontologists under lasting obligations to you.” Surely “my cup runneth over; I have a goodly heritage.” Greater than their obligations to me, are mine to the men of science who have described, published, but, above all, have prepared and exhibited the noble monuments of creative genius which I have been so fortunate as to discover and make known to the civilized world. My own body will crumble in dust, my soul return to God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure “to generations yet unborn.”