INTRODUCTION 



By HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN, 



President and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology 

 of the American Museum of Natural 

 History, New York 



OUR bookshelves contain the lives or narratives of 

 adventure of many hunters of living game, but the 

 life of a fossil hunter has never been written before. 

 Both are in the closest touch with nature and, there- 

 fore, full of interest. The one is as full of adven- 

 ture, excitement and depression, hope and failure, 

 as the other, yet there is ever the great difference 

 that the hunter of live game, thorough sportsman 

 though he may be, is always bringing live animals 

 nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil 

 hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals 

 back to life. This revivification of the past, of the 

 forms which once graced the forests and plains, and 

 rivers and seas, is attended with as great fascination 

 as the quest of live game, and to my mind is a still 

 more honorable and noble pursuit. 



The richness of the great American fossil fields, 



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