Geological Papers. 7X 



winds. No wonder the late Prof, E. D. Cope saw in imagination 

 these shells as the remains of a feast of Titans. 



This great Cretaceous shell will be mounted in the American 

 Museum, New York. We found in the same vicinity enough ma-- 

 terial of the mosasaur Platecarpus coryphoius to enable us, with 

 the assistance of some exchanges we made with the University of 

 Kansas, to make a complete slab mount of this swimming lizard, 

 once so abundant along the shores of the old Cretaceous ocean in 

 western Kansas. The specimen is seventeen feet long, and is be- 

 ing mounted by my two sons, George and Charles, and myself, and 

 is now nearly completed. 



Our second camp proved very rich. Here we camped south- 

 west of Banner post office, in Trego county. Some photographs I 

 exhibit show some sculptured towers near Castle Rock, a few miles 

 west of our camp. George discovered a fine skeleton of a great fly- 

 ing reptile Pteranodon. This also has gone to the American 

 Museum. One wing was complete, including the claw-armed 

 fingers used in clinging to rocks while at rest. Our bats hang 

 head downward, while the Pteranodons hung with head up. 



The crowning discovery of our work here was the discovery by 

 Oeorge Sternberg of a nearly complete skeleton of a great shark, 

 Lamna. In 1891, while employed by the Munich Museum, I dis- 

 covered the first and most complete skeleton known of the shark 

 Oxyrhina mantelli in the same vicinity. This was made the sub- 

 ject of Dr C. R. Eastman's inaugural address delivered before the 

 Ludwig-Maximillian University of Munich for his Ph. D. degree. 



The specimen we collected on the south side of Hackberry creek, 

 south of Banner post office, in Trego county, includes the plates of 

 the mouth holding the teeth, of which some 150 are in sight, and 

 the entire column of flattened disk-like vertebrae to within five feet 

 of the end of the tail. The total length is about twenty feet of the 

 preserved head and column. I think this will prove one of the 

 greatest scientific discoveries of the year, because the sharks are 

 cartilagenous, and consequently their skeletons are not preserved. 

 But in the two cases mentioned enough bone was deposited to pre- 

 serve the greater part of the skeleton. I further believe that such 

 discoveries will prove that the ancient sharks do not reach the 

 enormous proportions that science has believed, owing to the size 

 of the teeth. For instance, the great shark of the Tertiary, Char- 

 charodon megalodon, found along on the coast of South Carolina, 

 has enormous teeth, measuring six inches in length. By compar- 

 ing them with the living man-eating shark of the same region to- 



