Kansas Academy of Science. 205 



FIVE YEARS* EXPLORATIONS IN THE FOSSIL BEDS 

 OF ALBERTA. 



CiiARiiK.s II. Stek.vukkc;. 



IN the early part of the year 1912, with my son George F,, I 

 went to the Victoria Memorial Museum at Ottawa, Canada, 

 with a skeleton of a Kansas mosasaur, Platecarpiis cori/phivus; 

 a large fossil fish, Porthus molossus: and a skeleton of a Titano- 

 therium. which I discovered in the Oligocene of Niobrara 

 county, Wyoming. The other two skeletons George found in 

 the Kansas chalk. We mounted this material, working from 

 March until sometime in June. We found there a great 

 museum building with little original material for exhibition, 

 chiefly casts, and a few common fossil reptiles from Europe. 

 Doctor Brock, the director of the museum, was anxious to 

 secure the services of myself and my sons to build up for their 

 museum a collection of the wonderful horned, crested duck- 

 bills, and plated dinosaurs of the rich fossil beds of the Red 

 Deer river. The Survey had discovered these beds twenty-five 

 years before. 



Barnum Brown, the great fossil reptilian collector and stu- 

 dent, was already reaping a rich harvest in this field for the 

 American Museum of Natural History of New York. Although 

 collectors had spent three seasons in this field early in our cen- 

 tury, no complete skeletons for mounting were added to their 

 store until the fall of 1912, when my son, Charles M., found 

 a thirty-two foot duck-billed dinosaur of the genus Tracho- 

 don. The skeleton was complete except the tail. We mounted 

 it as a slab mount in the Victoria Memorial Museum. Mr. L. M. 

 Lambe, the vertebrate paleontologist of the Geological Survey, 

 in a popular description of it in the Standard, Montreal, Canada. 

 August 23, 1913, says in his title to the illustration: "Canada's 

 first complete dinosaur. This magnificent specimen, which is 

 now in the museum of the Geological Survey, in Ottawa, is the 

 one discovered last year in the bad lands of Alberta. The ani- 

 mal is supposed to have lived over 3,000,000 years ago. It is 

 the first complete skeleton of its kind in Canada." We also 

 found another genus of the trachodonts not yet described. 

 This material was from the Edmonton series of the Cretaceous, 

 supposed to approach closely the Lance beds of Wyoming. 



