Much of this area
indeed is desert, too far away from water to be profitably searched
under present conditions, or too far away from railroads to allow of
transportation of the finds at a reasonable expense. Fossils are much
more common in certain parts of the region, and these localities have
mostly been explored more or less thoroughly. But the field is far
from being exhausted. New localities have been found and old
localities re-explored in recent years, yielding specimens equal to or
better than any heretofore discovered. And as the railroad and the
automobile render new regions accessible, and the erosion of the
formations by wind and rain brings new specimens to the surface, we
may look forward to new discoveries for many years to come.
In other continents, except in Europe, there has been but little
exploration for dinosaurs. Enough is known to assure us that they will
yield faunae no less extensive and remarkable than our own. We are in
fact only beginning to appreciate the vast extent and variety of these
records of a past world.
In a preceding chapter it was shown that the chief formations in which
dinosaur remains have been found belong to the end of the Jurassic and
the end of the Cretacic periods. The Jurassic dinosaur 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.
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