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.
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