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 the researches of geologists throughout
the Rocky Mountain region. I doubt not that many hundreds of tons will
eventually be exhumed." Rather a startling prophecy to make within
eighteen months of their discovery, but it was hardly exaggerated.
It is impossible to say which of these three observers actually made
the first discovery of Jurassic dinosaurs; whatever doubt there is is
in favor of Mr. Reed.
Professor Lakes, accompanied by his friend Mr. E.L. Beckwith, an
engineer, was, one day in March, 1877, hunting along the "hogback" in
the vicinity of Morrison, Colorado, for fossil leaves in the Dakota
Cretaceous sandstone which caps the ridge, when he saw a large block
of sandstone with an enormous vertebra partly imbedded in it. He
discussed the nature of the fossil with his friend (so he told me) and
finally concluded that it was a fossil bone. He had recently come from
England and had heard of Professor Phillips' discoveries of similar
dinosaurs there.
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