e
of a sun-baked bluff. The summer before, a group of geology men from a
rival University had actually camped within a hundred yards of what was
later discovered to be a deposit of rare fossils. It was therefore with
heightened satisfaction that their reconnaissance had resulted in the
discovery and excavation, bone by bone, of the complete skeleton of
several most interesting prehistoric monsters that had lain all these
ages embedded in the shale.

One bone four feet long, he told them, and weighing several hundred
pounds, had been found in fragments in the shale, but it had been fitted
together again, done up in plaster bandages and braced with splints,
quite as a surgeon treats a broken leg. Another, found embedded in solid
rock, had to be shipped in the rock, each piece being numbered as it was
removed from the cliff as an aid to fitting it together again. Then with
hammer and chisel the delicate feat of cutting away the rock and leaving
the bone exposed was slowly and painstakingly accomplished. Thus have the
bones buried before ever man trod the earth been made to tell their
story. Often it takes more than a single specimen to reconstruct for the
scientist the whole of the creature, but relics of fully thirty
Triceratops have been discovered in different parts of the world, and
where one skull has a broken nose, another shows it intact, and so on
through its entire anatomy.

Its habits may in part be reasoned out, as for instance, if its hind legs
are disproportionately long, it likely walked erect at least sometimes.

"That, as it happens, was not the case with Triceratops," he added.
"There was only a slight difference between his fore and hind legs.
Triceratops had teeth made for browsing, not for rending flesh; his
single claw, round and blunt, does not indicate any pugnacious tendency
on his part, and the solidity of his bones are found to-day in either a
very sluggish animal or a partially aquatic one. The shape and rapid
taper of the tail vertebrae indicates a rather short tail, round rather
than flat,--ill adapted for swimming,--and so following through the list,
till we have a Triceratops elephantine in general build, though more like
a rhinoceros in face with a horn over his nose and two over his eyes, a
horn-supported neck ruff, and a generally sluggish mode of life.

"In the coal fields complete imprints of Ichthyosauria have been found,
doubtless due to the carbonization of the animal matter. And i