STRATIGRAPHIC POSITION OF LANCE FORMATION 359 



NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE MEDICINE BOW RIVER, CARBON COUNTY, 



WYOMING 



In the early nineties, when the late J. B. Hatcher was searching 

 for new fields that might possibly supply additional material 

 belonging to the then recently discovered group of horned dino- 

 saurs (Ceratopsidae), he made an examination of the country lying 

 along the North Platte River some twenty-five or thirty miles 

 north of old Fort Fred Steele, in Carbon County, Wyoming. 

 Hatcher observed fragmentary remains of dinosaurs at a point 

 which he indicated 1 as "on the North Platte River opposite the 

 mouth of the Medicine Bow River." As the dinosaurian remains 

 were neither abundant nor well preserved, the country was not 

 again visited until 1906, when a party from the United States 

 Geological Survey, under the direction of Mr. A. C. Veatch, was 

 engaged in investigating the coal resources of the so-called Carbon 

 County coal-field. Veatch 2 published an outline geological map 

 on which was shown the areal distribution of the formations 

 involved. From this map it appeared that strictly speaking a 

 point "opposite the mouth of the Medicine Bow River" would 

 fall within Veatch's so-called "Lower Laramie," 3 which is there 

 6,500 feet in thickness. Unfortunately Veatch did not collect 

 any dinosaurian remains and thus settle definitely their position 

 in this section, but from residents of the region who had known of 

 Hatcher's discoveries it was pretty clearly indicated that they 

 came from a series of low bluffs about a mile up the North Platte 

 River from a point opposite the mouth of the Medicine Bow, in 

 beds belonging to Veatch's so-called "Upper Laramie," which 

 are in part at least the equivalent of the "Ceratops beds" of Con- 

 verse County. The question of the absolute stratigraphic posi- 

 tion of these dinosaur-bearing beds was thus held in abeyance until 

 the past season (1910), when Dr. A. C. Peale and the writer spent 

 ten days in the region, during which we secured data which settled 



l Am. Nat., XXX (1896), 118. 



2 U.S. Geol. Surv., Bull. 316 (1907), 244, PI. XIV. 



3 The "Lower Laramie" of Veatch is the same as the Laramie of the Denver 

 Basin of Colorado as shown by its stratigraphic position and contained fossils. See 

 Veatch, Jour. Geol., XV (1907), 526-49. 



