822 OLDER MESOZOIC FLORAS OF UNITED STATES. 
a mile, stand these symmetrical cones, buttes, and knolls of variegated 
marls, often almost wholly of blue,clay. This blue-clay stratum, 20 
feet in thickness, can be seen along the base of the general escarpment 
overlain by red marls, and these in turn by brown or reddish sand- 
stones, the topmost stratum being a massive sandstone. ‘The taller 
buttes have the blue clay at the base and the red marls above. 
Immense quantities of fossil wood occur on and around these eroded 
buttes, and in many cases large, much disintegrated logs occupy their 
immediate summits, and have been the occasion of their preservation. 
At the foot of one of these buttes I found a specimen that I con- 
sider to be a petrified cone, but only the upper portion is represented 
fora length of 83cm. It is somewhat compressed laterally, and the 
longer diameter is 3 cm., while the shorter is only a trifle over 2 cm. 
The transverse fracture is uneven, consisting of two unequal planes, 
rising at different angles toward the apex and forming an obtuse 
reentrant angle on one side of the center, which passes across the cone 
in the direction of the minor axis. On the larger face of the fracture 
the radiate structure is clearly shown. The surface is occupied by 
the thick, irregularly rhombic scales, arranged in quincunx order, 
varying somewhat in size, but averaging 12 mm. wide by 8 mm. high, 
and often showing the polygonal scars of the deciduous tips. 
So far as the cone itself is concerned, it might, except for its small 
size, be referred to the living genus Araucaria, and the form and gen- 
eral appearance of the scales approach very close to those of .A. cre- 
tacea Brongn., as figured by Saporta in Schimper’s Traité de Paléon- 
tologie Végétale, Atlas, pl. Ixxvi, fig. 2 (see text, Vol. II, p. 255), 
which comes from the Greensand (Neocomian) of Nogent-le-Rotrou 
(Eure-et-Loir), in France. Considering the age of these beds, how- 
ever, it is more probable that it represents the ancestral form of the 
present genus, and it is safer to refer it to the extinct genus Arau- 
carites. I will give it the name Araucarites Chiquito, which refers to 
the Colorado Chiquito, or Little Colorado, on whose banks it was 
found, and also emphasizes its relatively small size. 
That this cone was actually borne on some one of the many trees 
among the petrified remains of which it lay when I picked it up can 
not, of course, be doubted, but it is equally obvious that no means 
are at hand for connecting it with specimens of wood collected at the 
same time and place. 
I also found in these denuded hillocks petrified bones. They come 
from the red marls over the blue clay, and were seen in place. No 
attempt was made to excavate the beds, but an expert collector of 
vertebrate remains could in all probability do this with success. The 
specimens collected were weathered out of the sides of the buttes and 
lay at their base. They were mere fragments, but included one coin- 
plete vertebra. 
