We found many fish and saurians or mosasaurs also. Very different was our method of collecting them then from what it is now, for fossil hunting is as capable of improvement as any other form of human endeavor. Then we went over, in a few months, all the chalk in western Kansas, which lines the ravines on either side of the Smoky Hill and its branches for a hundred miles; now it takes us five years to get over the same ground. Then we dug up the bones with a butcher knife or pick, and packed in flour sacks with dry buffalo grass, which we pulled with our fingers. Some strange animals were created by Cope and Marsh in those early days, when they attempted to restore a creature from the few disconnected bones thus carelessly collected. Now we take up great slabs of the chalk, so that we can show the bones _in situ_, that is, in their original matrix, so that they may be the more easily fitted together in their natural relations with each other. When, after much careful exploration, we find, sticking out of the edge of a canyon or wash, the bones of some “ancient mariner” of the old Cretaceous ocean, we first lay bare a floor above the bones by picking away the rock. Then I, usually stretched at full length on this floor, with a crooked awl and a brush, uncover the bones enough to be able to determine how they lie, often keeping up the tedious work for hours. When the position of each bone has been ascertained, my son George, who for years has been my chief assistant, and I cut trenches around the specimen, and, hewing down the outside rock two or three inches, make a frame of 2 × 4 lumber, cover the bones with oiled paper, and fill the frame with plaster. As the fossil rarely lies level, it is necessary to have the cover ready to nail on, a board at a time, while the plaster is being poured in. This results in a panel of even thickness, with every bone in or near its original position, or at least in the position in which it was buried. After the plaster has hardened comes the difficult labor of digging the rock away from underneath. One has to lie on one’s left side and work with a light pick, using great care, so as to cut away the rock just enough to allow the frame to come down by its own weight. If force is used very likely the rock, with its enclosed fossil, will be torn from the frame, and the specimen ruined. Afterwards the rock is leveled off even with the frame, and the bottom nailed on. The case is then placed in a larger box with excelsior carefully packed around it. The illustration (Fig. 18) shows a huge panel in process of being cut out. George and I spent two weeks of heavy labor upon another. Luckily, it was preserved in chalk hard enough to allow of its being lifted without breaking. The slab was about four inches thick, and weighed at least six hundred pounds, yet he and I handled it entirely alone, getting it boxed and into the wagon ourselves.