Story of a Monster Fish 13 



covery. Why did this monster fish whose remains 

 are not only abundant in the thousand feet of 

 Kansas Chalk, but fragments of whose skeletons 

 have been found in many parts of the world be- 

 come extinct? From my long experience in the 

 fossil beds I most surely believe that he had his 

 day and disappeared, as has the Moa, and Great 

 Auk, and many other species. I have collected 

 redwood leaves and cones from the Dakota Group, 

 Cretaceous, in Kansas, and in the Upper Cre- 

 taceous of Alberta, and Wyoming. Now however 

 they range over a small territory along the Coast 

 Range of California, and their days are num- 

 bered. 



Animals come on the stage of life, exist for a 

 greater or lesser period as it may happen, and 

 then disappear ; and the old saw "that every dog 

 has his day" is literally true of the past as of the 

 present. Another fine skeleton George found, to 

 add to the trophies of his hunt after big game, 

 was a beautiful little Tylosauft, or ram-nosed 

 mosasaur. It was twelve feet long only, but was 

 very complete indeed. This also went to Senck- 

 enberg Museum. (Fig. 5.) 



In 1911, a young man I had employed, Mr. Jas- 

 per son of Lawrence, Kansas, found a fine skull 

 of a Triceratops. Charlie prepared it in the 

 same region since he had taken a homestead for a 

 ranch, married, built himself a house, and spent 

 the winter there, not only preparing the skull for 

 the Paris Museum, but in cleaning the bones of 



