250 KANSAS UNIVERSITY SCIENCE BULLETIN. 



Mr. Wood kindly accompanied us to the place where he had 

 discovered the specimens in the bed of a small tributary of the 

 Smoky Hill river. This is usually a dry creek, but the recent 

 heavy rains had filled it and had strongly undercut the banks. 

 A close examination of the exposure disclosed several frag- 

 ments of bones exposed in a thin layer of bluish-gray marl. 

 This material was deposited in a slight depression made by 

 erosion in the Cretaceous chalk which lay immediately below. 



"Subsequent excavations revealed the presence of seven or 

 eight skeletons, all crowded within a space ten feet square. 

 These were removed and the large bull has been mounted. In 

 endeavoring to account for the presence of this number of indi- 

 viduals in so small an area it has seemed to me that there is 

 only one explanation. The bone bed lay at the west edge of 

 an old Cretaceous canyon of some 200 yards' width, running 

 north and south, and in a smaller one running east and west. 

 It is supposed that the small herd of bisons was driven by a 

 severe northwest storm along under the northern bluffs of the 

 small east and west canyon. Coming to the intersection of this 

 with the deep north and south canyon they were stopped by 

 the sharp descent, and, huddled under the protecting cliff, 

 finally perished. 



"The presence of the arrow-head can be accounted for only 

 on the supposition that it was fixed in the flesh of the animal. 

 The fact that the arrow-head was firmly imbedded in the solid 

 matrix directly under the scapula, at least twelve feet back 

 from the edge of the cliff and under twenty-five feet of de- 

 posited soil, precludes the possibility of its having been sub- 

 sequently introduced." 



For comparison with the common Bison bison I give, side 

 by side, the measurements of a medium-sized bull of this spe- 

 cies and corresponding ones of the extinct form : 



Inches. Inches. 



Length from tip of nose to tip of tail 106 122 



Height at level of longest neural spine 63 79^/^ 



Height at level of hind leg 55 62 



Height of fore leg, without scapula 36 ST^/^ 



Height of hind leg 46 51% 



Length of scapula 19% 22 



Length of pelvis 19% 23 



Extreme depth of barrel 36 50 



