Our bookshelves contain the lives or narratives of adventure of many hunters of living game, but the life of a fossil hunter has never been written before. Both are in the closest touch with nature and, therefore, full of interest. The one is as full of adventure, excitement and depression, hope and failure, as the other, yet there is ever the great difference that the hunter of live game, thorough sportsman though he may be, is always bringing live animals nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals back to life. This revivification of the past, of the forms which once graced the forests and plains, and rivers and seas, is attended with as great fascination as the quest of live game, and to my mind is a still more honorable and noble pursuit.

The richness of the great American fossil fields, which extend over the vast arid and semi-arid area of the West, scattered over both the great plains region and the great mountain region, has resulted in the creation of a distinctively American profession: that of fossil hunting. The fossil hunter must first of all be a scientific enthusiast. He must be willing to endure all kinds of hardships, to suffer cold in the early spring and the late autumn and early winter months, to suffer intense heat and the glare of the sun in summer months, and he must be prepared to drink alkali water, and in some regions to fight off the attack of the mosquito and other pests. He must be something of an engineer in order to be able to handle large masses of stone and transport them over roadless wastes of desert to the nearest shipping point; he must have a delicate and skilful touch to preserve the least fragments of bone when fractured; he must be content with very plain living, because the profession is seldom, if ever, remunerative, and he is almost invariably underpaid; he must find his chief reward and stimulus in the sense of discovery and in the despatching of specimens to museums which he has never seen for the benefit of a public which has little knowledge or appreciation of the self-sacrifices which the fossil hunter has made.

The fossil fields of America have fortunately attracted a number of such devoted explorers, and one of the pioneers on the honorable list is the author of this work, who by his untiring energy has contributed some of the finest specimens which now adorn the shelves and cases of many of the great museums of America and Europe.

Although special explorations have been described, sometimes in considerable detail, this is the first time that the “life of a fossil hunter” has been written, and it is fitting that it comes from the pen of the oldest living representative of this distinctively American profession. The name of Charles H. Sternberg is attached to discoveries in many parts of the West; discoveries which have formed distinct contributions to science, to the advance of paleontology, to our knowledge of the wonderful ancient life of North America. His is a career full of adventure, of self-sacrifice, worthy of lasting record and recognition by all lovers of nature.