“You remember, Perry, I showed you the irregularities of the bone
layer. At the place where you started up that prong-horn antelope
to-day, the bone layer was level, and that little gully where you
retrieved that sage chicken you shot, just before dinner, was the
trough of one of those rock waves. The Laramie Plains are like a huge
graveyard of the giant saurians which has been crumpled like a sheet
of paper. So, when we had almost finished with the Como Bluffs, we
decided to prospect across the plains, watching carefully for each
place that might be the top of one of these waves, and therefore
might be an exposure of the fossil-bearing fresh-water rock.
“As the second in command of our party was riding over the plains,
keeping a sharp lookout for the characteristic lie of the land,
he noticed a little hillock. Not being a part of the usual wave
formation, it did not strike him forcibly, but, in riding past,
he noticed a number of brownish masses that looked like sandstone
concretions. Brown sandstone is not plentiful in that region, so he
looked a little more closely.
“Suddenly he pulled up with a jerk. There, at least, was something
that was not sandstone! A less experienced eye would have passed the
boulder by, but the Museum expert was too keen a man not to have
quick perception. Another, and another and yet another! He hopped off
his pony, dropped the reins, and came to the hillock.
“The entire mound was made of dinosaur bones!
“All the dark-brown boulders were the remains of ponderous fossils
which had slowly washed out from a great dinosaur bed beneath. The
bones had been so thickly strewn that they had held the soil together
against erosion. The explorer climbed the little hillock, and there,
near the top, was the abandoned dugout foundation of a shanty that
some Mexican herder had built there many a year ago. It was a shallow
cellar, only a few feet deep.
“The foundation was lined with a wall of fossil bones! These huge
petrified blocks which the herder had only thought of as stones
and used as a base for his shanty, were treasures that are now of
incalculable value to the scientific world. To the trained eye, this
hillock was like a sign-post slowly erected by Nature during millions
of years to point the way to the great cemetery below where the most
gigantic of her children lay buried.
“It was in the late spring of next year that I came on the scene.
The hillock was a mass of glowing color. Wild flowers were blooming
everywhere. The cacti were in full blossom, and the dwarf bushes of
the desert were in the few weeks of their greenness. Half-hidden amid
the flowers and the cacti were these brown boulders which had been
found to be bones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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