From the Middle Eocene of Colorado. (After Gidley.) In American Museum of Natural History. ]
FIG. 25.—FOSSIL RHINOCEROS, _Teleoceras fossiger_.
From Sternberg’s quarry at Long Island, Phillips Co., Kansas. Collected by Wortman; mounted in the American Museum of Natural History. (After Osborn.) ]
That year, 1884, in which I explored the quarry at Long Island, was a memorable one, not only because we secured a large carload of rhinoceros bones, but also because we had with us Mr. J. B. Hatcher, who afterwards helped to build up three great museums of vertebrate paleontology,—the museums of Yale and Princeton and the Carnegie Museum. With the last he was connected at the time of his death in 1904, just twenty years after he made his first collection of vertebrate fossils with me. A bright, earnest student, he gave promise of a future even then by his perfect understanding of the work in hand and the thoughtful care which he devoted to it. I have always been glad that I had the honor of being his first teacher in the practical work of collecting, although he soon graduated from my department, and requested me to let him take one side of the ravine while I worked the other. He employed Mr. Overton’s son with a plow and scraper, and got out a magnificent collection with no further instructions from me.
That same year Professor Marsh came to my quarry and leased it from the owner, and I never saw it again until 1905, when I came into my own once more, and in addition to the splendid mastodon, mentioned earlier in this chapter, found the material for two perfect mounts of the rhinoceros. One is to be mounted at Munich, the other at Bonn.
With Professor Osborn’s consent, I give a photograph of the fine specimen (Fig. 25) which Dr. Wortman secured in 1894 from this quarry for the American Museum. A vast collection from the same spot is stored in the National Museum in its original packages, with which I filled a car in 1884. I saw there a whole case filled with the skulls of the rhinoceros _Teleoceras fossiger_, which I secured in great numbers at Long Island.
It is strange to think that the foundation on which these beds of fresh-water deposits lie unconformably is the great Cretaceous sea bottom, whose tilted and uplifted strata tower two thousand feet above the carboniferous rocks in eastern Kansas. The Republican, Smoky Hill, and Kansas rivers have carved their way through all these strata, so that by following down these streams, one can get cross sections of the country.