REPORT OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY. 55 



storage racks and drawers, furnished room for such of the material as 

 was ahead}" cleaned. A very large share of the material could^not 

 however. ])e brought into the Museum building without blocking the 

 exhibition halls, and was, therefore, stored as fast as received, without 

 unpacking, in a rented building, as already noted. 



In June, 1899, the Union Pacitic Railroad Company extended to the 

 Smithsonian Institution an invitation to send a representative of the 

 Museum to participate in a collecting and exploring tour through 

 the fossil fields of Wyoming. This invitation was accepted, and Mr, 

 Charles Schuchert, assistant curator in the Division of Invertebrate 

 Fossils, was detailed to make the trip. Mr. Schuchert left Washing- 

 ton early in July and returned the last week in September. 



During this time, aside from man}' valuable observations, he col- 

 lected upward of 1,000 Jurassic invertebrates, and a verj^ complete 

 femur of a large Dinosaur, and purchased and donated to the Museum 

 the particularly tine gar, Lepidosteus atrox, shown in Plate 0. He 

 also obtained numerous lithological and mineralogical specimens. 



Inasmuch as there is much popular misapprehension regarding the 

 occurrence and mode of procedure in collecting these vertebrate remains, 

 or rather since the public at large has no adequate conception of the 

 skill and expense involved in collecting and so restoring such remains 

 that they may be of value for exhibition and study, I have introduced 

 the following extract from an article published b}^ Mr. Schuchert in 

 Science for November 17, 1899: 



In the very beginning, alarming setbacks are encountered when chmbingthe hills 

 in any direction for a "bone lead." Having the good fortune to discover one, the 

 real work then begins in the digging, only to find that every bone is cracked into 

 innumerable pieces. These nnist be bandaged and set in plaster, and when all is 

 hard the bones can be turned to undergo more bandaging. This means that one 

 must have patience, be expert with pick and shovel, with gumiy sacking and jjlaster, 

 and with saw and hammer. However, with all these difficulties to overcome, no 

 less than 6 carloads of bones were shipped this summer from Medicine Bow, a little 

 village on the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming, l)y si)ecially organized parties 

 from the universities of Wyoming and Kansas, and the Fielil, Carnegie, and American 

 museums of natural history. 



In no one place are complete Dinosaur skeletons found. Sometimes a "quarry " 

 will yield a lot of vertebrai, or a number of either hind or fore limbs, or there is a 

 general mixture of parts of animals of different genfera. To make an adequate col- 

 lec;tion of Jurassic Dinosaurs, therefore, requires several successful field seasons. The 

 cost is still further enhanced since in the laboratory the bones nuist be cleaned, 

 hardened, and restored before they are ready for study and exhibition. On accomit 

 of these conditions and the further one that Dinosaur skeletons are very large, the 

 work is extremely expensive. We can, therefore, believe that the best skeleton of 

 Brontosanrus in Professor Mareh's collection, an imperfect one, cost him $10,000. 



No systematic explorations with a view to enriching the collections 

 in paleobotany, mineralogy, or geology were undiniakon, though a 

 very considerable amount of material was obtained by exchange. 



