San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1896-10-24
SEARCH OF SCIENTISTS.
Prof Osborn g Hunt for Prehistoric
Quadrupeds of the Rockies
Fossil Hunting and Its Attendant Vicis-
situdes and Emotions - summer
Heat a Great Obstacle
to Success.

| to Success.
Prof. Henry Fairfield Osburn, cura
tor of vertebrate paleontology in the
American Museum of Natural History
contributes a paper on PREHISTORIC
Quadrupeds of the Rockies" in which
he says:
Before describing the animals them
selves we may stop to note what our
present knowledge of them has cost in
human skill and endurance. Every one
of these pictures is drawn from COM
plete skeleton hewn out of the solid
rock, and each of these skeletons rep
resents years and years of arduous ex-
ploratioD in which Workman, Hatcher,
Peterson and others sent out by the
American museum, by Princeton or by
Yale, have become famous. Our party
! found the Titanothere in a broiling
alkali canyon of South Dakota. Its
head was protrudIng from hard sand
stone cliff, and the chest, limbs and
trunk were chiseled out by the men I'm.
der rude shelter which lowered the
noon temperature to LOG degrees.
They were encouraged to think
that the whole beast had been
mired in a standing position.
This was probably the case orig
inally, but suddenly they came
across a fault; it appeared that the
hind limbs had been swept away; and
it required two years more searching
before bones of an animal of CORE
spending size were secured. Every
other skeleton has it's own story of de
termination, disappointment and sur
prise.
THE old lake basins, once on sea level,
and enriched by the moist, balmy winds
of the Pacific, are now elevated from
1000 to 5000 feet. The only redeeming
feature of their present aspect of alb.
solute barrenness is that the absence
of vegetation leaves the old graves and
burying grounds bare. Fossil bones
and skeletons are not plentiful-far
from it; but trained eye sees great
distance along the bare gullies, cliffs
and canyons, and your daily scramble
of from Is to 20 miles enables you to
prospect over a vast stretch. You are
off in the morning, stiffened by frosty
night. You know by sad experience
that the ice in the basins does not prom"
Use a cool day. Your backbone is still
freezing while the sun begins to broi]
and blister your skin, and you are the
living embodiments of the famous des-
sert served by the Japanese-a hot crust
without, an ice within. Your trail be-
gins On the upland, which may be the
actual level of the old lake bottom; and,
as if walking through graveyard, you
never look for bones until the land
breaks away by erosion.
when you reach the edge of this up
land you look off into a sea of rock, wild
beyond description, and you plunge
down the slope to a certain level Then
you follow the level round and round
and in and out. Here you are on a seam
which bears fossils. Above and below
it are other familiar fossiliferous seams,
and between them are barren. seams
where you will not find a bone if you
search till doomsday. This level, per-
haps, represents the delta of a great
mountain river which swept the ami
mails out with coarse sand, pebbles and
debris. Sometimes you walk miles and
miles, up and down, day after day, and
see nothing but common turtle bones,
which are so deceptive and tempting at
a distance that the fossil hunter pro-
fanely kicks them aside. Turtles are
found everywhere, because they swan
out, basked in the sunshine in the mid
lakes and occasionally sank to the bot
tom, while the carcasses of land animals
were buried in the deltas or nearer
shore.
I'm such fossIl-barren land the heat
seems twice as torrid as on the buttes,
your muscles and back ache doubly,
your tongues lies parched from the last
gulp of alkali water, your soul abhors
fossil and longs for the green shade of
the east and the watermelon, when, all
of a sudden, little projecting bone
strikes your wearied eye. You fall on
your knees and breathe gently on the
loose sand; little scraping, and you
see signs of a skull-perhaps of some
missing link. The thrill of discovery
spreads like an elixir through your
frame, and two or three hours later,
after carefully cutting out the prize,
you walk vigorously back to camp,every
inch man.
"Thusfossil hunting is life of vicissi
tudes and emotions. The fossil hunter
is predestined to his work, like the
sportsman. He returns east in the
autumn, vowing he will never go back
to the Bad Lands; but as the favorable
months Of spring come round he be-
comes more and more restless, until he
is off. The country that is as hot as
hades, watered by stagnant alkali pools,
is almost invariably the richest in fos-
sis. Here, in fact, as you find the great
est variety and number of bones, you
enjoy the most delightful flights of the
scientific imagination; when parched
and burned, you conjure before you the
glories of these ancient lakes."-Cen.
fury.