to the need of finding a cook and getting a couple of additional horses. 

 Finally, we were able to get to work on the big beast, whose skull we 

 had taken out the year before. On reopening the hole, we almost imme- 

 diately began to find more bones. We discovered almost all the verte- 

 brae of the neck, several of the back, a very perfect shoulder blade and 

 some limb bones. The carcass must have lain on the ground and been 

 pulled about by beasts of prey, until the bones were separated and scat- 

 tered over a considerable area, and the next flooding of the rivers had 

 buried them under layers of silt. With the crude methods of extracting 

 fossil bones which were then in use, we could not avoid breaking a 

 large bone into several pieces in taking it out. Each fragment was care- 

 fully wrapped in cotton, or tissue-paper, and the parts of a single bone, 

 if not too large, were wrapped in heavy paper and tied up in a single 

 parcel. The parcels, in turn, were packed in wooden boxes, with straw, 

 or sawdust, for their long journey by wagon and rail to Princeton. 



As the road, near which we were working, was very little used, we 

 thought it would be safe to leave our paper bundles in plain sight, until 

 we had finished the job and could send the wagon for the stuff, but, 

 after we had returned to camp, a lot of wagons drove up and made camp 

 just across the stream. They were Mormons migrating from Idaho to 

 Utah and looked like a very rough lot. After their arrival, one of my 

 students rode into camp in a state of great excitement, and showed 

 me a piece of fossil bone, evidently from our collection, which he had 

 picked up on the road. The emigrants had carried off our bundles, but 

 disgusted to find that they contained only pieces of stone, had thrown 

 them away. Eventually, we were able to pick up almost every piece. 



After we had finished with U intatherium alticeps, we started for 

 Twin Buttes with a packhorse, leaving two men to act as campkeepers 

 at Lone Tree. Once established in our beautiful grove beside the icy 

 spring, I hunted up the spot where Paul had made his find of the 

 year before, when the escape of our horses had forced us to leave Twin 

 Buttes. When the few bones of that specimen had arrived in Princeton 

 and had been cleaned up, I saw that they belonged to a rare and very 

 imperfectly known carnivorous creature, which Cope had discovered in 

 1872 and named Mesonyx, and I was therefore most eager to return 

 and get the rest of him, which I felt sure was in the rock still. This 

 proved to be the case; we spent a week at the hole and got out a nearly 

 complete skeleton including a beautiful skull. I wrote a paper on the 

 discovery and, after forty years in a tray, Sinclair mounted the skeleton 

 and it is one of the prizes of the collection. 



n 172 : 



