First Expedition to Kansas Chalk 55 



November. Our boarding place was five miles away, 

 and every night the ground froze hard. Nothing 

 daunted, we went to work with a will. 



The head and trunk region had already been un- 

 covered, and many of the ribs and spines had been 

 swept away and lost. We took up the head and 

 front fins in a great slab of plaster, as the chalk in 

 which they lay had disintegrated under the influence 

 of the frost. A violent windstorm was raging at 

 the time, and to complete the slab, George had to 

 bring water from a tank a hundred yards away. I 

 can still see that boy running up with his pail of 

 water, trying to carry it so that it would not be 

 emptied by the raging, howling wind that was almost 

 tearing his coat from his back, while I stood and 

 shouted, " Hurry up ! The plaster's hardening ! " 



The rest of the column, to the tail, we took up sep- 

 arately, and as the great tail-fins and many of the 

 caudal vertebrae were present with their spines, em- 

 bedded in solid chalk, we removed five feet of super- 

 incumbent rock, cut a trench around the slab con- 

 taining the bones, and took it up by digging under it. 



This made another huge mass to be handled. The 

 section containing the head weighed over six hun- 

 dred pounds, and this tail section almost as much. 

 The latter froze solid before we could get it up to 

 the tent, where we kept a fire burning to dry out the 

 water from the bones and thus prevent the inju- 



