aur formations
skirt the Rockies and outlying mountain ranges but are often turned up
on edge and poorly exposed, or barren of fossils. The richest
collecting ground is in the Laramie Plains, between the Rockies and
the Laramie range in south-central Wyoming, but important finds have
also been made in Colorado and Utah. The Cretaceous Dinosaur
formations extend somewhat further out on the plains to the eastward,
and the best collecting regions thus far explored are in eastern
Wyoming, central Montana and in Alberta, Canada.

THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF DINOSAURS IN THE WEST.

_By Prof. S.W. Williston._

Most great discoveries are due rather to a state of mind, if I may use
such an expression, than to accident. The discovery of the immense
dinosaur deposits in the Rocky Mountains in March, 1877, may
truthfully be called great, for nothing in paleontology has equalled
it, and that it was made by three observers simultaneously can not be
called purely an accident. These discoverers were Mr. O. Lucas, then
a school teacher, later clergyman; Professor Arthur Lakes, then a
teacher in the School of Mines at Golden, Colorado; and Mr. William
Reed, then a section foreman of the Union Pacific Railroad at Como,
Wyoming, later the curator of paleontology of the University of
Wyoming--even as I write this, comes the notice of his death,--the
last. I knew them all, and the last two were long intimate friends.

In the autumn of 1878 I wrote the following:[19]

"The history of their discovery (the dinosaurs) is both interesting
and remarkable. For years the beds containing them had been studied by
geologists of experience, under the surveys of Hayden and King, but,
with the possible exception of the half of a caudal vertebra, obtained
by Hayden and described by Leidy as a species of _Poikilopleuron_, not
a single fragment had been recognized. This is all the more remarkable
from the fact that in several of the localities I have observed acres
literally strewn with fragments of bones, many of them extremely
characteristic and so large as to have taxed the strength of a strong
man to lift them. Three of the localities known to me are in the
immediate vicinity, if not upon the actual townsites of thriving
villages, and for years numerous fragments have been collected by (or
for) tourists and exhibited as fossil wood. The quantities hitherto
obtained, though apparently so vast, are wholly unimportant in
comparison with those awaiting th