Expeditions to the Miocene of Wyoming and the Chalk Beds of Kansas

Abstract

ON July 28 I reached my station at Edgemont, S. D. The next day I drove out to my son Charlie's cabin, thirty-five miles west, on Old Woman creek, in Converse county, Wyoming. I found that, with the assistance of my youngest son, Levi, and Conrad Jesperson, of Lawrence, he had secured a complete series of caudal vertebrae and bones of the pelvis and hind limbs of the great swimming dinosaur Trachodon; and three-quarters of a fine skull, six and a' half feet long, of Triceratops, the huge three-horned lizard of the Laramie. The Trachodon material has gone to Munich to complete a composite open mount, I having sent the other material last year. The magnificent skeleton secured last year by my son Charlie went to the Senckenberg Museum. I believe these are the only complete skeletons of American dinosaurs in Europe. The seven-foot skull I discovered last year of Triceratops, which I was preparing for the Victoria Memorial Museum, was destroyed last year when the brick walls of the building at 617 Vermont street, in which it was housed, was blown in on top of it by a cyclone-a great loss to science and myself. Having gone over the Laramie beds thoroughly during the last four years, on the fourth of August we moved over to the old deserted Seaman ranch on Sage creek, a branch of Old Woman creek, in Converse county, Wyoming. These beds are known as the Upper Harrison beds. The first day in this rich field that has been but little explored, I discovered the skeleton of the great titanothere Brontotherium gigas. The pelvic arch was partly exposed and measured four feet across the illia; the complete skull; vertebral column, with ribs continuous to first caudal; one humerus, and other bones. The lower limbs were absent. This specimen, according to Doctor Matthew, curator of vertebrate palmontology in the American Museuim of Natural History, New York, is the best single specimen known, and is the size of their mounted composite specimen that measures over twelve feet long and about eight feet high. We are now preparing this noble specimen for the Victoria Memorial Museum at Ottawa, Canada, and will secure casts of the feet from the American Museum specimen.