142 



TITANOTHERES OF ANCIENT WYOMING, DAKOTA, AND NEBRASKA 



delusions of the distance. Tlie castellated forms which fancy 

 had conjured up have vanished, and around one, on every 

 side, is bleak and barren desolation. 



Then, too, if the exploration be made in midsummer, the 

 scorching rays of the sun, pouring down in the hundred defiles 

 that conduct the wayfarer through this pathless waste, are 

 reflected back from ' the white or ash-colored walls that- rise 

 around, unmitigated by a breath of air or the shelter of a soli- 

 tary shrub. 



The drooping spirits of the scorched geologist are not per- 

 mitted, however, to flag. The fossil treasures of the way well 

 repay its sultriness and fatigue. At every step objects of the 

 highest interest present themselves. Embedded in the debris 

 lie strewn, in the greatest profusion, organic relics of extinct 

 animals. All speak of a vast fresh-water deposit of the early 

 Tertiary period and disclose the former existence of most re- 

 markable races that roamed about in bygone ages high up in 



characters belonging now to the above three orders; for the 

 molar teeth are constructed after the model of those of the 

 hog, peccary, and babyroussa; the canines as in the bear; 

 while the upper part of the skull, the cheek bones, and the 

 temporal fossa assume the form and dimensions which belong 

 to the cat tribe. Another, the Oreodon of Leidy, has grinding 

 teeth like the elk and deer, with canines resembling the omnivo- 

 rous thick-skinned animals, being, in fact, a race which lived 

 both on flesh and vegetables and yet chewed the cud like our 

 cloven-footed grazers. 



Associated with these extinct races we behold also, in the 

 Mauvaises Terres, abundant remains of fossil Pachydermata of 

 gigantic dimensions and allied in their anatomy to that sin- 

 gular family of proboscidate animals of which the tapir may be 

 taken as a living type. These form a connecting link between 

 the tapir and the rhinoceros; while, in the structure of their 

 grinders, they are intermediate between the daman and rhinoc- 



FiGUKE 83 — Mauvaises Terres, Nebraska. After David Dale On en, 1851 



the valley of the Missouri, toward the sources of its western 

 tributaries, where now pastures the big-horned Ovis montana, 

 the shaggy buffalo or American bison, and the elegant and 

 slenderly constructed antelope. 



Owen continues (p. 198) with a popular description 

 of the extinct animals found: 



Every specimen as yet brought from the Badlands proves to 

 be of species that became exterminated before the mammoth 

 and mastodon lived and differ in their specific character, not 

 alone from all living animals, but also from all fossils obtained 

 even from cotemporaneous geological formations elsewhere. 



Along with a single existing genus, the Rhinoceros, many new 

 genera never before known to science have been discovered, 

 and some, to us at this day, anomalous families, which com- 

 bine in their anatomy structures now found only in different 

 orders. They form, indeed, connecting links between the 

 pachyderms, plantigrades, and digitigrades. For example, in 

 one of the specimens from this strange locality, described by 

 Dr. Leidy under the name Archiotherium, we find united 



eros; by their canines and incisors, they connect the tapir with 

 the horse, on the one hand, and with the peccary and hog on 

 the other. They belong to the same genus of which the labors 

 of the great Cuvier first disclosed the history, under the name 

 of Palaeotherium, in publishing his description of the fossil bones 

 exhumed from the gypsum quarries of Montmartre, near Paris, 

 but are of distinct species; and one at least, of this genus, dis- 

 covered in the Badlands (Palaeotherium proutii), must have 

 attained a much larger size than any which the Paris Basin 

 afforded. In a green, argillo-calcareous, indurated stratum, 

 situated within 10 feet of the base of the section, a jaw of this 

 species was found, measuring, as it lay in its matrix, 5 feet 

 along the range of the teeth, but in such a friable condition, 

 that only a portion of it could be dislodged; and this, notwith- 

 standing all the precautions used in packing and transportation, 

 fell to pieces before reaching Indiana. 



A nearly entire skeleton of the same animal was discovered, 

 in a similar position, which measured, as it lay embedded, 18 

 feet in length, and 9 feet in height. But here, as in the former 

 case, the crumbling condition of the bones rendered it impos- 



