68 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



east of the Colville INIouth from -which I last year got a few specimens for 

 the Peabody Museum, ***** \^ to getting to Prince Albert Land 

 or Coronation Gulf, I think there is no reasonable doubt of it for next year 

 — " barring accidents " and such unparalleled hard luck as everybody has 

 had up here this year. 



"Near Point Tangent a trading schooner passed us going east and I got 

 them to take 27 sacks of flour and some other stuff for Dr. Anderson, bvit 

 Capt. Mogg tells me she probably did not get within some 60 miles of Barter 

 Island — certainly not farther than Flaxman and probably not so far. That 

 will be well enough for us, for the nearer the Colville the better. 



"I met the other day an Eskimo who used to live in the Colville. From 

 him I got a map which should enable me to locate at least three families 

 of the Colville group this winter — so the Colville plans are all right, so 

 far, except their expensiveness, as previously confessed from Point Barrow. 

 ^ * * * *" 



RECENT PURCHASES OF FOSSIL VERTEBRATES. 



THE Department of Vertebrate Pali^eontology has recently pur- 

 chased from Mr. Charles H. Sternberg, the well known col- 

 lector, a number of important fossils. Chief of these is a unique 

 specimen — a "mummied" Dinosaur, as President Osborn has aptly called 

 it. It is a nearly complete skeleton of the Trachodon or Duck-billed 

 Dinosaur, in which not only the bones but also the greater part of the 

 skin of the head, body and limbs is preserved intact. As found in a soft 

 sandstone stratum near Lance Creek, Wyoming, the skeleton lay on 

 its back, the head turned to one side, the fore limbs stretched out, the 

 hind limbs doubled up close to the body. Over head, neck and limbs 

 lies the thin curtain of skin, shrunk down tight upon the bones and 

 sunken in over most of the body cavity below the ribs. 



At first glance, the skin seems to have irregular rows of small spots 

 over the surface, the spots being about the size of a half dollar or less. 

 On closer examination, each spot is seen to be made up of a number of 

 little polygonal plates, like the pieces of a mosaic, with innumerable 

 smaller plates filling the interspaces between the spots. There are no 

 overlapping scales such as cover most modern reptiles, nor anything like 

 the smooth or hairy skin of mammals or the feathered skin of birds. 

 The dinosaur skin is sui generis, — completely unlike that of any modern 



