SECRETARY'S REPORT 25 



north of Harrison, Nebr. An incomplete skull of this horse and two 

 excellent skulls of the Oligocene dog Daphoenus were collected. Op- 

 erations were then transferred to Bitter Creek, Wyo., where portions 

 of two skeletons of Coryphodon as well as small mammals were secured 

 from quarries on exposures south of the town. After August 1 field- 

 work was commenced on the fossiliferous exposures of Knight Eocene 

 and presumably Evanston Paleocene in Fossil Basin near Kemmerer, 

 Wyo., where additional materials were obtained. Several excellent 

 specimens including a partially articulated skeleton of Menisco- 

 therium were found in the New Fork tongue of the Knight formation 

 as exposed along Alkali Creek east of Big Piney. The museum carry- 

 all was returned to Washington on August 17, 1956. 



During the last two weeks of December 1956 Dr. Gazin studied 

 specimens of the earliest known North American primates in the col- 

 lections of Princeton University, the American Museum of Natural 

 History, and Yale University. On January 15, 1957, in accordance 

 with a previous agreement relative to the final distribution of Pleisto- 

 cene sloths and other mammals excavated near Ocii in the Republic 

 of Panama he proceeded to Panama to unpack and assemble the fossil 

 skeletal material returned to Dr. Alejandro Mendes, director, Museo 

 Nacional of Panama. This assignment was completed on February 

 3, 1957. He examined various Eocene adapid and tarsiid primates 

 at Princeton University and reviewed the lower Eocene anaptomor- 

 phids and other Tertiary mammals in the collections of the American 

 Museum of Natural History, June 2-9, 1957. 



During the first week of November 1956 Theodore B. Ruhoff and 

 Shelton P. Applegate investigated a fossil whale occurrence in the 

 vicinity of Smithfield, Va. 



To obtain required specimens of fossil fishes and other early verte- 

 brates for the exhibition series, Dr. David H. Dunkle, associate curator 

 of vertebrate paleontology departed from Washington on August 17, 

 1956, for Europe. A field excursion in northern Scotland under the 

 guidance of Prof. T. Stanley Westoll of the University of Durham 

 resulted in the collection of Devonian fishes in such historic localities 

 as Holburn Head Quarry, Murkle Bay, the Thurso Foreshore and 

 Achanarras Quarry in Caithness; Edderton, Cromarty, and Ethie 

 Burn in Rosshire; Turin Hill in Forfarshire; and the vicinity of 

 Lesmahagow in Lanarkshire. At Copenhagen he arranged an ex- 

 change for Triassic fishes of Greenland and Madagascar with the 

 Danish Mineralogisak Museum. Extensive collections of fossil fishes 

 were examined at the National Museum of Sweden and the Swedish 

 Geological Survey Museum in Stockholm. Casts of primitive tetra- 

 pods from the Devonian of Greenland were received. At Bonn, Ger- 

 many, late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic fossils, including such rare 

 forms as a lower Devonian ostracoderm and a placoderm, were selected 



