204 Life of a Fossil Hunter 



sympathy, and pictures them in their various haunts. 

 It is thus that I love creatures of other ages, and 

 that I want to become acquainted with them in their 

 natural environments. They are never dead to me ; 

 my imagination breathes life into " the valley of dry 

 bones," and not only do the living forms of the 

 animals stand before me, but the countries which 

 they inhabited rise for me through the mists of the 

 ages. 



The mind fills with awe as it journeys back to 

 those far-distant lands. Stop, reader, and think! 

 In this John Day region, ten thousand feet, or nearly 

 two miles, of sedimentary and volcanic rock lie 

 above the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous, from 

 which I dug last summer the beautiful skull of a 

 Kansas mosasaur, Platecarpus coryphans, which lies 

 before me now, its glistening teeth as perfect as in 

 the days when they dripped with the blood of its vic- 

 tims. How many ages were those ten thousand feet 

 in building? How long has it taken the running 

 water, with its tools of sand and gravel, to carve out 

 the Grande Coulee and the river valley, and expose 

 all the various formations, with their records of the 

 life of the past? And yet all this has taken place 

 since my mosasaur, which seems to watch me as I 

 write, fought its last battle and sank to rest beneath 

 the waves of the Cretaceous sea. 



