46 Kansas Academy of Science. 



We secured a great many specimens of the oreodont Merychyu» 

 harrisonensis, including a skeleton, over twenty good skulls, and 

 many fragments of over a hundred individuals. This species, so 

 common in these beds, was about the size of a sheep, with com- 

 plete dentition. The strong, chisel-shaped incisors were doubtless 

 often used in offense as well as defense. Without doubt he browsed 

 on trees and bushes, and was also omniverous in habit. He was pro- 

 vided with four hoofed toes on each foot, and a dew claw that 

 represented the tifth toe, showing that many of the animals of that 

 day were getting away in foot structure from the five- toed planti- 

 grade mammals of the Eocene. We secured a very fine skull of 

 the hog-like Elotherium, and the large bear-like wolf Amphicyon 

 superhns, besides jaws and teeth and parts of skulls of two species 

 of three-toed horses, and a couple of species of rhinoceros, etc. 

 Fresh-water and land turtles were very abundant. We secured 

 some twenty-five or more specimens, ranging from five inches to 

 twenty inches in length. Stylemeys nebrascensis and Testudo lati- 

 Gwieus were the most common. 



We must have seen over a hundred broken-up shells over the 

 area of about a quarter section we explored. The Upper Harrison 

 beds present bold faces of tablelands that rise everywhere along 

 the edge of this formation — a prolonged spur of the Pine Ridge 

 of Nebraska. These tablelands and castellated buttes rise above 

 the lower strata of this formation at least 600 feet. Usually, as 

 remarked, the cap sheet, which is of hard clay and sandstone, has 

 weathered into perpendicular walls, while the softer gray, com- 

 minuted, shale-like rock disintegrates below into fantastic sculp- 

 tuary, as specially noted in the beautifully carved and fiuted slopes 

 of the butte, of which I show you a photograph (plate). This 

 bold headland of the tableland behind has lost its protecting cap 

 of harder rock, leaving the frost, wind and weather to freely sculp- 

 ture it into the most beautiful butte I have ever seen in any forma- 

 tion. 



The region that yielded the richest returns lay at the heads of 

 two tablelands about a mile apart. I suppose about 600 feet of 

 the Upper Harrison beds are exposed in the canyons and walls of 

 the high tablelands. The slrata is a shale-like gray rock that dis- 

 integrates easily and exposes the fossils once buried here. The 

 material resembles the deposits of the flood plain of a river, and, 

 to add to this belief, a wide river course crosses the beds and is 

 traced by the washed sand and gravel of the old bed. The river 

 was about a hundred yards wide. So the old theory of great lakes 



