Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum CollectionsMatthew, William Diller
Science
Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
Matthew, William Diller
Dinosaurs
In the spring of 1898, as I approached the hillock on which the ruin
stands, I observed, among the beautiful flowers, the blooming cacti,
and the dwarf bushes of the desert, what were apparently numbers of
dark-brown boulders. On closer examination, it proved that there is
really not a single rock, hardly even a pebble, on this hillock; all
these apparent boulders are ponderous fossils which have slowly
accumulated or washed out on the surface from a great dinosaur bed
beneath. A Mexican sheep-herder had collected some of these petrified
bones for the foundations of his cabin, the first ever built of such
strange materials. The excavation of a promising outcrop was almost
immediately rewarded by finding a thigh-bone nearly six feet in length
which sloped downward into the earth, running into the lower leg and
finally into the foot, with all the respective parts lying in the
natural position as in life. This proved to be the previously unknown
hind limb of the great dinosaur _Diplodocus_.
In this manner the "Bone-Cabin Quarry" was discovered and christened.
The total contents of the quarry are represented in the diagram (not
reprinted.) It has given us, by dint of six successive years of hard
work, the materials for an almost complete revival of the life of the
Laramie region as it was in the days of the dinosaurs. By the aid of
workmen of every degree of skill, by grace of the accumulated wisdom
of the nineteenth century, by the constructive imagination, by the aid
of the sculptor and the artist, we can summon these living forms and
the living environment from the vasty deep of the past.
_The Famous Como Bluffs._ The circumstances leading up to our
discovery serve to introduce the story. From 1890 to 1897 we had been
steadily delving into the history of the Age of Mammals, in deposits
dating from two hundred thousand to three million years back, as we
rudely estimate geological time. In the course of seven years such
substantial progress had been made that I decided to push into the
history of the Age of Reptiles also, and, following the pioneers,
Marsh and Cope, to begin exploration in the period which at once marks
the dawn of mammalian life and the climax of the evolution of the
great amphibious dinosaurs.
In the spring of 1897 we accordingly began exploration in the heart of
the Laramie Plains, on the Como Bluffs. On arrival, we found numbers
of massive bones strewn along the base of these bluffs, tumbled from
their stratum above, too weather-worn to attract collectors, and
serving only to remind one of the time when these animals--the
greatest, by far, that nature has ever produced on land--were monarchs
of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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