Important Geological Discoveries.

During the last year Professor Lakes has been engaged in a series of geological explorations, which have resulted in the discovery of several new and gigantic fossil remains of prehistoric animals of the *Dinosaurian*, or terrible lizard (as the Greek word means) order. One or two of them, according to Professor Marsh, are the largest known land animals ever discovered. The remains were found in the rocks of our mountains of the cretaceous or great chalk period—a period when millions of little corals and other minute creatures were secreting lime from the ocean and leaving it, together with their skeletons, cells and homes, to form the chalk cliffs of England and other places, and long lines of chalk bluffs in Kansas; a period remarkable for its extraordinary development of reptiles, and amongst them these truly "terrible lizards" or *Dinosaurs* of our foothills.

The first of these remains was discovered in March of this year. It was a gigantic saurial vertebra, about two feet long by fifteen inches wide, lying in bass-relief on a bed of sandstone. Several large fragments of ends of limbs, thigh and leg bones were found near, resembling herculean war clubs. These were with great labor dragged down through heavy snow to the railway station and forwarded to Professor Marsh, of Yale college, and by him were pronounced as belonging to a new and gigantic species of dinosaur, the largest ever discovered and the largest known land animal. He named it the Titan saurian of the mountains (*Titanosaurus montanus*). He judged that this creature, of which the modern alligator and the lizard give a very imperfect idea, was fully sixty feet long, and when, according to the manners and customs of the dinosaur, he stood erect on his hind legs, he was thirty-five feet high, and fed partially upon the boughs of the forest that clothed the islands of the cretaceous ocean, whose sea bottom now forms some of the rocks of our foothills.

Strange as it may seem, the anatomist sees in these gigantic dinosaurs an affinity to the birds, and most of them walked on their hind feet alone like the ostrich. This is inferred from the tracks which they have left in rocks, as well as the length of their hind limbs.

In the same block with the Titan, was discovered an almost perfect crocodile's head with teeth and several procoelian vertebræ. Of this Professor Marsh says, in his address before the American Association at Nashville, Tennessee: The beds of the Rocky Mountain Wealden have just provided us with a genuine missing link (not a Muldoon). A saurian diplosaurus with essentially the skull and teeth of a modern crocodile and the vertebræ of its predecessor from the trias. This peculiar reptile clearly represents an important state in the progressive series, and evidently one soon after the separation of the crocodile branch from the main stem.

With these were found the remains of a real turtle (not the concretionary septaria), and in another locality, by Prof. Mudge, of Manhattan, Kansas, one of the party, the smallest of dinosaurs, not larger than a cat (*danosaurus*); two or more species allied to the Titan, and also of Titanic dimensions, were discovered, and at present the party is engaged in excavating the remains of a monster who bids fair in size and perfectness of bones to exceed the rest. Some twenty-five monstrous vertebræ, averaging from eleven to fifteen inches in diameter, and one sacral vertebra—that is, the vertebra to which the tail of an animal is attached, and which usually consists of three vertebræ joined or co-ossified together—measures two feet seven inches in length, with arched processes on either side, making a huge mass of petrified bone two feet seven inches square. Close beside it is another large bone bent like a scimeter, three feet ten inches long and twenty-two inches at the butt end, possibly a scapula.

But by far the most enormous bone was discovered last Saturday—a huge limb bone, probably a femur or thigh bone, five feet long, shaped something like a boot; the butt end, namely, from toe to heel, twenty-eight inches, by twelve diameter, and the shaft of the leg fourteen inches wide by eight thick. Lying as it does on the dump, like the pillar of some ancient temple, nothing can impress the observer more than this bone with the magnitude of the animal to which it belonged. This bone is not complete, but when so it must have been from seven and a half to eight feet long, and was a part of a leg fully twelve feet in length. The bones of the paddle, of an hour-glass shape, and fine ebony black shiny teeth, three inches long, of conical shape, with a fine serration on the cutting sides, were found. These teeth are typical, we believe, of the *Iguanodon*.

The party have now been at work some months, but their work seems far from accomplished. Great difficulty at times has been experienced from the intense hardness of the sandstone in which the monsters were frequently entombed, and blasting had frequently to be done in order to remove the rock from the bones. —*Denver (Col.) Tribune,*
*October 22, 1877*