Florida and Some Snakes 229 



the horse teeth which were the first indications that there 

 were Miocene mammals to be found here. He certainly de- 

 serves the greatest credit for his instantaneous appreciation 

 of the importance of this site. 



Deposits of Miocene Age throughout eastern North 

 America are generally of marine origin. In the West they 

 are abundantly developed and exposed in the Badlands, 

 where an unbeUevable number of vertebrate fossils have 

 been found. Before we dug at the Thomas Farm we had no 

 picture of Miocene life on land in the Eastern United 

 States that was of anything but the most fragmentary 



sort. 



By extreme good fortune we enlisted two extraordinary 

 helpers. Uncle Frank Douglas and John Henry Miller were 

 characters that might have stepped from the pages of The 

 Yearling. In spite of the fact that we were strangers, hence 

 very unwelcome in a region abounding in moonshine stills 

 and where one of our near neighbors w^as a murderer who 

 had left a neighboring state for excellent reasons, we became 

 and are fast friends. John Henry and Uncle Frank can take 

 out a badly crushed rhino skull and "make a biscuit of it," 

 as we say, cutting down around it until it stands on top of a 

 pinnacle, and plastering it up with strips of burlap soaked in 

 thin plaster of Paris. Then, after this covering is hard, 

 they undercut the fossil and turn it over, then plaster it up 

 on the bottom side. 



From a little hole our dig has grown until now you could 

 put a big house in the excavation. And the end is not yet, 

 for while we have taken out i8 genera and 22 species of 

 mammals, most of them undescribed and many of them 

 curious and bizarre, we have indications that there are at 



