344 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1956 



help of six campesinos, two of these being our Ocuefio helpers, Juan 

 Franco and Viviano Valdivieso, brought with us to show the new 

 men the various techniques and procedures they had been taught. 



Eighty-five plaster-encased blocks were taken up at the new locality 

 (pi. 6), the relative position in which each occurred having been care- 

 fully plotted so that the significance of association might be worked 

 out later in segregating the materials by individuals as far as possible. 

 By the first of April there seemed no likelihood of completely exhaust- 

 ing the occurrence before the beginning of the rainy season, so work 

 was discontinued with the expectation of returning the following 

 year. The collection that had been accumulating in one of the rooms 

 of the alcaldia in Pese was hauled by truck to Ocii where the com- 

 bined collections were boxed for shipment. Much appreciated help 

 was obtained from the U. S. Air Force as General Beam of the Carib- 

 bean Air Command came to our aid, furnishing a truck and crane 

 (pi. 8, fig. 2) to get our 6-ton collection transported to the docks at 

 Cristobal. 



Most of the La Coca collection was prepared and restored in Wash- 

 ington, D. C, during the following year, so that at the time of our 

 return to Panama in 1951 we were able to ship back the better part 

 of the sloth material from that locality for exhibition in Panama's 

 museum. With regard to materials that we hoped to exhibit in the 

 U. S. National Museum it was our plan to select from the more ex- 

 tensive El Hatillo collection the best association of materials believed 

 to represent a single individual, adding to this skeletal elements of 

 comparable size from the same locality, completing, for purposes of 

 a free mount, what is known as a composite skeleton. It was to assure 

 ourselves of an adequate representation of the material for this pur- 

 pose that we returned to Pese in 1951. 



During the second season's work, which lasted from near the end 

 of January to the latter part of March, I was assisted by Franklin 

 L. Pearce, now chief of our laboratory of vertebrate paleontology. 

 With the help of six of the local campesinos (pi. 7, fig. 2), some of 

 whom worked for us the previous year, we drained the small lake 

 which had formed at the old pit at El Hatillo, and by starting new 

 excavations at various places in the vicinity of the spring we were 

 able to determine approximately the extent of the bone deposit. Work- 

 ing in from the northerly margin (pi. 4, fig. 2) toward the old excava- 

 tion we systematically covered most of the profitable ground and 

 recovered most, if not all, of the worthwhile remaining fossil mate- 

 rials. Additional fossil bones were detected in the mud deposit some- 

 what higher and to the east of the spring, but these were found for 

 some reason to be much more poorly preserved and not worth taking 

 up, a condition rather similar to that noted for the material observed 

 atFincaAued. 



