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PALEONTOLOGY: H. F. OSBORN 



Nebraska, discovered by James H. Cook in 1897. After the lapse of the 

 Carnegie researches and explorations, the American Museum entered this 

 quarry and through five years of continuous exploration (1911-1916) an 

 irregular area within a square of about 36 feet yielded nearly complete skulls of 

 ten individuals and skeletal parts of seventeen individuals all together. From 

 this wonderful material it has been possible to supplement the descriptions of 

 Holland and Peterson and to present for the first time the proportions and 

 pose, by which we may estimate the habits of this animal. We reach the 

 conclusion that the Moropus type was not plains hving, but forest living; 

 that it was the seclusion of the forests which protected this type and which 

 accounts for its great rarity in fossil deposits, for it is characteristic of forest- 

 living forms that they are not readily entombed. We form an entirely dif- 

 ferent conception of the habits of the animal when we observe the extremely 

 long fore limbs, which are not of the digging or fossorial type, and which 

 thus belie the apparently fossorial or digging structure of the terminal pha- 

 langes. It appears more probable that these terminal claws were used partly 

 for purposes of offense and defense, but largely for the pulling down of the 

 branches of the trees. The animal was probably forest living like the African 

 okapi, with which in its general body and head proportions it has many anal- 

 ogies. Like the okapi it survived through retreat to the recesses of the forests. 



