ANCIENT MAMMALS OF UTAH 



By C. LEWIS GAZIN 



Assistant Curator, Division of Vertebrate Paleontology, 

 U. S. National Museum 



The 1938 Smithsonian Institution expedition to Utah undertook 

 principally to continue investigation of occurrences of the earliest 

 mammals and lizards known from the State and to make a representa- 

 tive collection of upper Eocene fossils from the Uinta Basin. The 

 party, consisting of George F. Sternberg, Harold R. Shepherd, and 

 myself, met on June 1 at Price, Utah, and proceeded from there to 

 the Uinta Basin in the northeastern part of the State. At Vernal, 

 Utah, we were met by J. LeRoy Kay, of the Carnegie Museum, who 

 had kindly offered to show us around the basin and point out the 

 principal collecting localities. We spent 2 days in a pleasant and profi- 

 table reconnaissance of the region, marred only by our becoming 

 mired in mud toward the end of the second day, when our host 

 attempted to determine the speed of a horse which was running wild. 



We left the basin on June 4 and turned our attention to the Wasatch 

 Plateau country of central Utah. Our first camp was set up near a 

 delightful spring on the ranch of George Olson in Joe's Valley. 

 Exploration from this point consisted in reexamining the old localities 

 which had been prospected by the Smithsonian party the preceding 

 summer and in searching for new localities of f ossiferous Paleocene 

 deposits. Our experiences in this mountainous country of few roads 

 demonstrated the necessity of using horses, especially since the roads, 

 though good when dry, can become impassable for hours or days after 

 a little rain. Weather there during the summer months is continually 

 unsettled. 



We were fortunate in our prospecting in obtaining a much larger 

 representation of the fauna from the Paleocene exposures in lower 

 Dragon Canyon. Work in the Cretaceous of the same region was of 

 considerable profit in finding additional material of the large lizard 

 which Gilmore's party discovered the year before. One of the lizard 

 specimens which we found is so nearly complete as to be worthy of 

 permanent exhibition in the National Museum. 



On June 25 we broke camp in Joe's Valley and transferred our 

 attention back to the Uinta Basin. Camp was made at a locality known 

 as Myton pocket, one of the well-known localities for fossil verte- 



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