Kansas University Quarterly. 



Vol. III. JULY, 1894. No. i. 



On Various Vertebrate Remains from the 

 Lowermost Cretaceous of Kansas. 



BY S. W. WILLISTON. 



(With Plate I.) 

 Some months ago, Mr. C. N. Gould, principal of the public 

 schools in Ashland, Clark Co., Kansas, sent to the University a 

 number of vertebrate remains which he had found in the dark blue 

 shale of the so-called Neocomian or Comanche Cretaceous, which 

 outcrops in the vicinity of Ashland. Very recently I have had the 

 opportunity of spending a few days in the investigation of the out- 

 crops in company with Mr. Gould who materially assisted me. 

 My thanks are due him, not only for the kindness which he showed 

 me, but also for his placing all the specimens which he had collected 

 at my disposal. The outcrop has been sufficiently well described by 

 Prof. Cragin, who has the merit of first thoroughly studying and 

 describing them. For further information concerning them, the 

 reader is referred to his papers in the American Geologist. Suffice 

 it to say here that in the region which we examined — upper Bluff 

 Creek and Sand Creek with its tributaries — I found the beds in which 

 the vertebrates occur, Cragin's No. 4, lying unconformably upon the 

 red rocks of the Trias and surmounted by a thin stratum of the 

 characteristic Dakota sandstone, and the thicker Tertiary sandstones 

 of the uplands. The material is a dark blue shale, so strongly 

 impregnated with iron that the fossils are always more or less injured 

 after exposure. On moderately inclined slopes the bones, where 

 found at all, were always disintegrated and incrusted with sulphate 

 of lime. For this reason, they can be successfully sought only 

 on steep slopes, and such are infrequent. Furthermore, the bones 

 have always been found isolated, never together, so that it is hardly 

 to be expected that even a tolerably complete knowledge of the 

 fauna will be obtained in many years. The bones are found through- 

 out the whole thickness of the shale, for fifty or seventy-five feet. 



U ) KAN. UNIV. 9UAR. VOL. Ill, NO- 1. JULY, 1891, 



