University Studies. 



Vol. I. JULY, i8g2. No. 4. 



I. — Notes on a New Order of Gigantic Fossils. 



By ERWIN HINCKLEY BARBOUR. 



How it came about that the wondrous good lands were 

 ever dubbed the ' bad lands ' can never be apparent to the 

 naturalist. Still less apparent to him is the usage ' good bad 

 lands ' for the very worst, and ' bad bad lands ' for the best 

 or least sterile. Here he finds his promised land of buried 

 treasures ; or, what is quite as likely, unburied ones, dug out 

 and scattered at his feet by the same Nature which covered 

 them with clays and sands, or with the everlasting rocks 

 themselves. Nature dug generously here ; unearthing from 

 the sediment of those ancient lake-beds, great cities, as it 

 were, of buttressed walls, spires, palaces, colosseums, and 

 cathedrals, and, in their winding streets, the scattered bones 

 of their ancient dead. 



Our first day among these fantastic ruins showed us strange 

 scenes, and revealed to us gigantic fossil forms as new and as 

 unlike all other forms, living or dead, as are the lands in 

 which they abound unlike all other lands, — strange fossil 

 forms, towering head and shoulders above the most gigantic, 

 and destined to take rank with the most remarkable. 



The ground on which we walked, the vertical walls of 

 neighboring canons and 'draws,' the cores of 'blow-outs,' 

 where the winds had swept away the sand, leaving bare rocks 



University Studies, Vol. I., No. 4, July, 1892. 3*^^ 



