THE MUSEUM. 
35 
of the nose projected downward. Removing a mass of rock, the shoulder blade was 
exposed, a huge plate from two to three feet wide, and close alongside, his pelvis, 
nearly complete. When I had laid the hip bones bare, their expanse measured about 
four and a half feet. Better, if possible, than these, I exposed the perfect thigh bone, 
with a head as large as a cannon ball. This ran directly into the cliff, which had a 
dangerous face. Masses, tons in weight, were ready to drop at a moment’s notice, 
and every blow of the sledge seemed to loosen them the more. For four days I 
worked with my men in this remote altitude, before we secured all. 
At length we wrapped up the invaluable relics of this ancient king, whose mauso¬ 
leum now is the Mammoth Buttes, more perennial than the tomb of Cheops, more 
vast than the labyrinth of Minos, and bore them over the “ wind pass ” and down the 
great curved canon. The skull weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and it was 
found to be no light toil to carry it up the high cliffs that bounded the canon to the 
north, then slide it down another declivity of two hundred feet, then over 
another vast mass of bluffs, and finally down a rocky precipice of three hundred or 
more feet, to a point accessible to our wagons, altogether a trip of five miles in a 
straight line from the sage-brush. 
My inexplicable bone turned out to be the base of a horn of one side of the 
posterior angle of the cranium, showing that this animal possessed three pairs of 
horns, two of which rose upward and backward, with a slight divergence, one pro¬ 
jecting forward over each eye, and a pair of flat prominences overhanging the sides 
of the base of the elongated snout. Picture, then, to yourselves a narrow head, 
extending obliquely downward, presenting its eye-horns forward, terminating in a 
long nose overhung at the base by flattened processes, with short, flat, knife-edged 
tusks curving backward, and a small under jaw ; its body like that of an elephant, 
with high withers and a sloping rump, terminating in a short tail; its limbs rather 
shorter than those of the living elephant, but with the same short, stubby toes, and 
the knee below the body, as in the elephant, bear and monkey. The same ambling 
gait, the same huge ears, and the little twinkling eyes, all betrayed in life the 
elephantine kinship, while the hollow forehead and its surrounding horns, if not 
bearing the stamp of the elephant’s wisdom, marked him as a king, and his shining 
weapons showed his ability to maintain the claim. The long canines were, no doubt, 
for defence chiefly, and may have been used in pulling and cutting vines.and other 
branches of the forest, and the horns furnished formidable weapons of defence. This 
huge animal must have been of defective vision, for the eyes were so overhung by 
the horns and cranial walls as to have allowed him to see but little upward ; the 
muzzle and cranial crests obstructed the view, both forward and backward, so that the 
beast probably resembled the rhinoceros in the ease with which it might have been 
avoided when in pursuit. 
This I named the Eobasileus cornutus, and seeing reason afterwards to antici¬ 
pate that it represented another generic form, framed for it the name of Loxolo- 
phodon. 
