l^Ei^DAGUHU SEtllES 273 



Of BracliiosoMrus hrancai one humerus 2 meters long, the proximal half 

 of tlie associated ulna, and a tibia stood vertically in the strata, while 

 most of the skeleton lay near by, but more or less dismembered. Some 

 of the bones were much corroded and bitten or chewed. It is therefore 

 certain "that the Sauropoda had been mired by their feet in the [tidal] 

 muds." Accordingly, we must assume that these animals did not live 

 fully immersed in the water, for they would not have been mired if- they 

 had been thus suspended in the water. They wandered out over the mud 

 flats, were mired, and then destroyed by the returning tides. On the 

 other hand, in the sandstones their bones are rare, and in such places no 

 mired feet or vertically standing bones were found.^^ 



Of ornithopods, Janensch says there is but one occurrence in the Ten- 

 daguru. This is in the middle dinosaur zone at Kindope and is a form 

 related to the American Triassic genus Nanosaurus. Here was found a 

 veritable bone-bed, with the parts rarely in articulation, and all of it was 

 taken up in mass, though it required several years to do this. No entire 

 skulls were seen, only fragments, and while all the bones of the skeleton 

 are present and in excellent preservation, distal parts are in greatest 

 abundance. Femora, tibise, and fibulae, and the whole bone-bed as well, 

 lay ordered in the main in a northwest-southeast direction. Of indi- 

 viduals there must have been many dozens present, and associated there 

 were also a few bones of armored dinosaurs and of a small sauropod. 

 "Such an occurrence can have but one interpretation, namely, that a great 

 herd was killed by some catastrophe in the place of their burial.'^ To the 

 present writer, however, this is clear evidence not of death in the place of 

 burial, but of drowning in the river valleys at times of freshets, and hence 

 the transport and assorting in the direction of the stream currents.^'" 



In this connection, the writer calls attention to the wonderful entomb- 

 ment of hundreds of small ancestral camels in a fine-grained sandstone, 

 60 to 80 feet thick, of fresh-water origin and of Lower Harrison age 

 (Miocene) in the Niobrara Valley of Sioux County, Nebraska. The 

 preservation is very perfect, the skeletons being still articulate, and "the 

 hyoicls and the cartilaginous ribs in many instances being present. A 

 survey of this plan [plate 41] results in further confirming Doctor 

 Loomis' statement of the possible origin of interment of this material — 

 that is, the herd of animals meeting with a catastrophe up the stream, 

 their carcasses floated down and found lodgment in the backwater of some 

 large cove in which sands were accumulating. , . . Stenomylus is 



35 Op. cit., pp. 242-255. 



38 Op. cit., part ii, pp. 248, 256-258. 



