A near relative of the Indian elephant, and like the mastodon, a contemporary of Primitive Man. Note the greater height due to length of limb, the thicker and coarser hair, and the straighter shape of skull; the tusk formation, also, is characteristic, and longer than in modern elephants.] The boy looked eagerly to the southward over the countryside. “You’d like to go and start digging in Jackson’s Bog right now, wouldn’t you?” his uncle asked. “Yes,” Perry answered with a laugh, “I would. I never thought that there might be a Mastodon so near home.” “You don’t have to get far away from home to do fossil hunting,” his uncle reminded him. “I remember once I was talking to a group of young fellows in New York, bright working lads, and one of them said to me: “‘Oh, Professor, if only those Wyoming-Texas places you talk about weren’t so far away! I’d mighty well like to do something like fossil-hunting on Sunday afternoons and holidays, but there isn’t any chance.’ “‘Nonsense,’ I said to him, ‘there are the Palisades, right across the river from your home. You can get there for a nickel and a half an hour’s ride. I miss my guess if that isn’t a good fossil-hunting ground.’ “Less than a month after that, Perry, the famous skeleton of a Phytosaurus was taken out of those very rocks.” “By one of those chaps?” “By a group of Columbia College boys,” was the reply. “They were interested in geology and had gone over there one Saturday to do a little field work ‘on their own.’ Getting hungry, they sat down on a flat rock to eat lunch, and while lunching, one of them noticed some brownish stain on the rock. Half idly, he said: “‘This looks like a vertebra!’ “One of the others laughed, but the third, examining the stains, suggested: “‘It might be bone, at that. Let’s take a bit home and find out!’ “But when they tried to chip it out they found the bone as hard as the rock. Still, they got a small piece and tested it in the laboratory for phosphate, because they knew that if the sample were rich in phosphate it must have come from some living thing. Sure enough, they found phosphate and decided it was bone. They telephoned to the Museum, and as soon as our men went to the find, we recognized at once that it was part of a skeleton. We chiseled away the rock and found what became known as the ‘Fort Lee Reptile.’” “And it was a Phytosaurus?” the boy asked. “What does a Phytosaur look like?” “There were a lot of different Phytosaurus, Perry, but most of them resembled crocodiles, though more lizard-like than a modern crocodile. The Fort Lee specimen was christened _Rutiodon Manhattanensis_, and it’s the only one of that kind ever found.” “Wasn’t that great for those college chaps!” exclaimed Perry.