Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1891-11-01
A HOUSE OF WONDERS.
Myriads of Fossils the Tenants of q
Residence in Philadelphia.
PROF. COPE's UNIQUE COLLECTION.
A Tiny Skull That Is One Of the Evolu-
tionists' Missing Links.
OREGON ONCE A TROPICAL COUNTRY

rcoRRrsPoNDENcE OF THE pIsPArcH.1
PHILADELPHIA, October 31.-The most
remarkable house in the United States is al
No 21o2 Pine street in this city. It is oc-
cupied by Prof E D. Cope, the distin.
guished paleontologist, and is filled from
top to bottom with fossils There are
enough extinct beasts, birds and fishes in
the building, if they could only come to life
again, to form procession extending in an
unbroken line from Wanamaker's to Tren-
ton, N. J. Every room is stacked from
floor to ceiling with wooden and pasteboard
boxes containing bones Of creatures, big
| and small, the most recent of which died
hundreds of thousands of years ago. All the
closets are fairly stuffed with skeletons
The parlor is occupied by a reptile 20 feet
long. That is to say the skull of the vast
brute is there, with the shoulder blades and
the neck, but the rest of him extends
through the hallway and out into the back
yard. There is not space to put him to-
gether in proper shap-, and SO the vertabre
of the backbone are acked in drygoods
boxes. Each box 10 four-f ut cube and
holds one vertebr@. The bathroom, appro-
priate'y enough, is chuck full of fossil
fishes while the dining room is tenanted by
herd of ancient rhinocorosea These latter,
by the way, appear to have had no horns on
their noses and to have been quite harmless.
wiped out
SLEEPING AMONG MIGHTY SKELETONS
The Professor has the second-story front
room for his bed chamber. He sleeps there
when it does not happen to be convenient
for him to 60 out to his beautiful residence
at Germantown. The bed, dressing table
and washstand are crowded together in the
middle of The apartment and surrounded on
all sides by stacks of boxes, all of them
filled with fossils Scattered about the floor
and piled up in the corners are various frag-
ments, such as the jaw and shin-bone of a
mastadon, the pelvis of . mammoth, some
vertebra that once belonged to a whale, the
humerus of an extinct species of hippopota-
mus, and so on.
In the closet are what the owner calls his
''babies'' - huge fossil batrachians from
Texas. which in life resembled gigantic
frogs with short tails. Each of them was
ten feet in length. and it may be su-mised
that their jumping powers were something
phenomenal. However, there is q much
bigger one downstairs, which measured Is
feet These surprising creatures must have
from the quantity of their remains that are
dug up, and few hundred thousand years
ago they might have been seen hopping all
over the region mentioned.
THE FINS OF GIANT REPTILKA
Another closet in the entry on the seco-d
floor contains quantity of what is called
In Texas "fossil brushwood." It is dug up
quite plentifully in some parts of that State,
ka;~ 1oA s4esN olkI 81
natives are not aware of what 1t is In fact
namely, the spiny frills that grew like fins
along the backs OF giant lizards which lived
In the distant permiar epoch. They were
among the earliest reptiles that inhabited
the world, being ancestors Of the saurians
of the Mesozoic, or Age Of Reptiles, which
came after. In fact, some evolutionists
assert that man is descended through these
very beasta They grew to be about Is feet
In length, with spines four feet long, al
though their vertebra were no bigger than
q sheep'a
There were related species which had ex-
traordinsry back fins, with crosspieces like
the masts and yardarms of q ship. All of
them were carnivorous and exceedingly
fierce The vast numbers of them which
existed anciently in Texas must have
rendered things decidedly unpleasant for
most other occupants of that part of the
country.
In the parlor 10 also the skull of Hadro-
saur, about four times as big ss that of the
largest crocodile When 1t was alive, from
5000, 900 to 1900, 900 years ago, this remark
able lizard was at least 80 feet long and
stood perhaps 20 feet high ~
IT wADED KANGARoo-FAsHIoN
In its customary manner through the ocean
shadows and browsed upon the seaweeds
which formed its diet. The skull has two
very striking features. One is the teeth,
still perfect, which are 2, 600 in number and
are arranged in magazine fashion for grind
ing the vegetable food. No other sort of
animal, living or dead, ever possessed SO
extraordinary dentition. The other sur
prising point is the jaws, which are pro-
longed and shaped in front like a ducks
bill. fat and rounded, so that they could
pick up kelp and such fodder in the manner
of pair of enormous salad spoons.
There is hardly room on the lower floor,
however, for much besid as the bones Of the
70-foot camarasaurus above referred to. A
single vartebra of the neck is three feet
across, and there are ten Of them. They an
we'll as those of the back, are all hollow and
originally served, being filed with warm
air from the lungs, as floats to support the
body of the animal Some of the most in
teresting remains in the third story back |
are those of giant crocodiles of the Mesozoic.
Their sculls exhibit very interesting |
peculiarity, the nasal opening being set |
back SO far AZ to be Just in front of and al |