rospector for gold, the
fossil-hunter may pass suddenly from the extreme of dejection to the
extreme of elation. Luck comes in a great variety of ways: sometimes
as the result of prolonged and deliberate scientific search in a
region which is known to be fossiliferous; sometimes in such a prosaic
manner as the digging of a well. Among discoveries of a highly
suggestive, almost romantic kind, perhaps none is more remarkable than
the one I shall now describe.

_Discovery of the Great Dinosaur Quarry._ In central Wyoming, at the
head of a "draw," or small valley, not far from the Medicine Bow
River, lies the ruin of a small and unique building, which marks the
site of the greatest "find" of extinct animals made in a single
locality in any part of the world. The fortunate fossil-hunter who
stumbled on this site was Mr. Walter Granger of the American Museum
expedition of 1897.

In the spring of 1898, as I approached the hillock on which the ruin
stands, I observed, among the beautiful flowers, the blooming cacti,
and the dwarf bushes of the desert, what were apparently numbers of
dark-brown boulders. On closer examination, it proved that there is
really not a single rock, hardly even a pebble, on this hillock; all
these apparent boulders are ponderous fossils which have slowly
accumulated or washed out on the surface from a great dinosaur bed
beneath. A Mexican sheep-herder had collected some of these petrified
bones for the foundations of his cabin, the first ever built of such
strange materials. The excavation of a promising outcrop was almost
immediately rewarded by finding a thigh-bone nearly six feet in length
which sloped downward into the earth, running into the lower leg and
finally into the foot, with all the respective parts lying in the
natural position as in life. This proved to be the previously unknown
hind limb of the great dinosaur _Diplodocus_.

In this manner the "Bone-Cabin Quarry" was discovered and christened.
The total contents of the quarry are represented in the diagram (not
reprinted.) It has given us, by dint of six successive years of hard
work, the materials for an almost complete revival of the life of the
Laramie region as it was in the days of the dinosaurs. By the aid of
workmen of every degree of skill, by grace of the accumulated wisdom
of the nineteenth century, by the constructive imagination, by the aid
of the sculptor and the artist, we can summon these living forms and
the living en