164 The Cretaceous Seas 



and looking up saw enormous Pieronodouts those 

 glorious flying reptiles, hovering over head. 

 With broad expanded wing, some twenty feet 

 from tip to tip, they swooped downward, or rest- 

 ed in graceful attitudes in mid-air. Their great 

 eyes scanned the ocean before us for fishes, and 

 when one was discovered dropped like a shot into 

 the bay rapidly reappearing with a fish between 

 their toothless beaks. One after another broke 

 the mirror like surface of the deep, and always 

 came to the surface with a fish. Their unerring 

 sight had discovered. No eagle ever dropped 

 quicker on his frightened quarry than these liz- 

 ards. The scene before us was exciting indeed. 



After finishing our labor and stretching the 

 skin of our Mosasaur on the sand to dry we con- 

 tinued our strole along the sand. In a deep hole, 

 we admired a whole colony of the most beautiful 

 swimming crinoids, or sea lillies we had ever 

 seen. They were stemless and floated with the 

 currents of Mosaurian Bay, as I had named the 

 sheet of water on the new map I had made. Their 

 bodies, about the shape of half an egg, with an 

 opening in the center, and ten arms radiating 

 from the margin. These arms were three feet 

 long, with feathered edges. Over the mouth too, 

 were smaller arms used to comb off into the 

 mouth the tiny animal life of the sea, that was 

 strained through, and caught in the meshes of 

 the feathered arms. My boys found hundreds of 

 these crinoids in the chalk on Beaver Creek, Kan- 



