South Dakota School of Mines 15 



close of its first division the badland formations as represented 

 in the Black Hills region, begin to be deposited. Barriers 

 somewhere are let down and a great horde of new animals of 

 higher type appears. Here in the foreground gently flowing 

 streams push their muddy way through reedy marshlands and 

 vigorous forests and furnish a lazy playground for countless 

 turtles and occasional crocodiles. In favored recesses groups of 

 rhinoceroses may be seen, some heavy of bulk and water loving, 

 others graceful and preferring dry land. Little fleet-footed an- 

 cestral horses with names as long as their legs nibble the grass 

 on the hillsides or by means of their spreading three-toed feet 

 trot unhindered across the muddy flats, the nearest restraining 

 rider being more than a million years away. Here and there we 

 see a group of predaceous dogs and not infrequently do we get a 

 glimpse of a ferocious tiger-like cat. On the higher ridges, 

 even far within the hills and mountains six horned herbivores 

 reveal their inquisitive pose and perhaps anon, like the antelope, 

 show their puffs of white as they scamper from the nearing 

 presence of some stealthy foe. But the "reigning plutocrat" is 

 the Titanothere. In great numbers we see his majestic form as 

 he moves among his kin and crops at his leisure the coarse 

 grasses of the lowlands. Here and there are beavers and 

 gophers and squirrels busy with their toil and their play, and 

 hedgehogs and moles and sw r ine and deer and tapirs and cam- 

 els, and many other creatures too strange to mention without 

 definition. Because the badlands as we now know them were so 

 lung little frequented by man except in favored places do not 

 think the country was then a barren waste or a place of solitude. 

 To all these animals it was home. To them the sun shone, the 

 showers came, the birds sang, the flowers bloomed, and stately 

 trees gave convenient shade to the rollicking young of many a 

 creature. 



But "everlasting hills" have their day and rivers do not 

 flow, on forever. These animals, under a Guiding Providence, 

 having inherited the more essential characters of their ances- 

 tors, and developing new traits as a result of their environ- 

 ment, in turn transmitted to later individuals the features best 

 fitted to serve their purpose in the winning of life's great race. 

 One by one, group by group, they died, the bodies of most of 

 them quickly feeding the surrounding elements but a chosen 

 few r , tucked away by the kindly hand of nature, serving as 

 unique monuments of the dawning time of the great mamma- 



