The overlying soil and rocks are loosened with a pick and
removed with team and scraper down to the fossil layer.
b. The fossil layer is carefully prospected with small tools,
chisels, awls and whisk brooms exposing the bones as they lie in
the rocks.
c. The blocks containing the fossils are channelled around,
plastered over top and sides, undercut and carefully turned over
and the under side trimmed and plastered.
d. The blocks are then packed in boxes or crates with hay or any
other available packing material.
e. Boxes are loaded on wagons and hauled across country to the
railroad.
f. Boxes are finally loaded on cars and shipped through to New
York City.]
The bluffs appear to represent the region of an ancient shoreline,
such conditions as we have depicted in the restoration of
_Brontosaurus_ (fig. 22)--the sloping banks of a muddy estuary or of a
lagoon, either bare tidal flats or covered with vegetation. Evidently
the dinosaurs were buried at or near the spot where they perished.
The Bone-Cabin Quarry deposit represents entirely different
conditions. The theory that it is the accumulation of a flood is, in
my opinion, improbable, because a flood would tend to bring entire
skeletons down together, distribute them widely, and bury them
rapidly. A more likely theory is that this was the area of an old
river-bar, which in its shallow waters arrested the more or less
decomposed and scattered carcasses which had slowly drifted
down-stream toward it, including a great variety of dinosaurs,
crocodiles, and turtles, collected from many points up-stream.
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