INTRODUCTION 5 



not less than two or three years. As such an expenditure of time is 

 neither practicable nor desirable at present, all that has been done 

 so far, in addition to those needed for study and exhibition, is the 

 separation of the various skeletons, so far as possible, from the clay 

 in which they were imbedded, leaving them connected and associ- 

 ated by the cementing matrix. The material was brought to the 

 laboratory in bandaged blocks of various sizes from fifty to four 

 hundred pounds in weight, as it was found most convenient in 

 the field to divide them. And even the preliminary separation of 

 the skeletons has been done for but little more than half of the 

 material secured — done in the hope of finding other forms than 

 those discovered in the earlier examination. And this hope has 

 been in part fulfilled. As this work goes to press a skeleton or part 

 of a skeleton of another form, a very large species of Captorhinus, 

 has been discovered. Among the skeletons and parts of skeletons 

 so far worked out, in part or wholly, there are at least a dozen 

 skeletons of Varanosaurus, as many or more of Cacops, including 

 eight or ten good skulls, five or six of Casea, the skeleton of Capto- 

 rhinus just mentioned, and a few bones of Scymouria. Not the 

 slightest indication of any large or very small animal has been 

 found so far. Of the species found among these skeletons, none 

 was known to the earlier explorers of the Texas Permian, unless 

 it be Seymouria, as represented in the fragmentary skull to which 

 the name Conodecles was given by Cope. One was described by 

 Broili seven years ago, and three at least and probably four are 

 new. 



The Cacops bone-bed lies, as well as I can estimate, two hundred 

 feet at least below the topmost exposure of the Clear Fork division, 

 about in the same horizon as, though perhaps a little higher than, 

 and about six miles distant from, the Craddock bone-bed. 



Craddock Bone-Bed 



This deposit of bones, to which frequent reference is made in 

 the following pages, was discovered in the autumn of 1909 by Mr. 

 Lawrence Baker of the University of Chicago expedition, near the 

 west line of the Craddock ranch, and about six miles northwest 

 of Seymour, Texas. The bones in this deposit extend through a 



