FIG. 41.—SKELETON OF _Hesperornis regalis_, THE GIANT TOOTHED-BIRD OF THE KANSAS CRETACEOUS.
Discovered by Charles M. Sternberg. In American Museum of Natural History. ]
FIG. 42.—SLAB OF FOSSIL CRINOIDS, _Unitacrinus socialis_, CONTAINING 160 CALYCES, COVERING FOUR BY SEVEN FEET. ]
Before these pages go to press, and a year after I began work on them, I am pleased to be able to tell my readers of two noble specimens of the Pleistocene Age I have just secured from the plains of Kansas, that great treasure house of the animals of the past. One is a majestic Bison, whose head towering above that of his fellows supported a pair of horn cores measuring six feet from tip to tip. Along the curve the distance is eight feet. The length of the head is two feet, the distance between the horns sixteen inches, and from the center of the orbits, one foot. These splendid horn cores were uncovered through a fortunate chance. It seems that the Missouri Pacific Railway, wishing to shorten the creek in the vicinity of Hoxie, Sheridan County, Kansas, cut a new right-of-way for it across a bend. Their excavation came within two feet of the bones buried below, thirty-five feet from the surface of the earth; a friendly freshet washed them out, and they were discovered by Mr. Frank Lee and Harley Henderson, of Hoxie, Kansas, June 15, 1902. I was so fortunate as to secure them in June, 1908. I have filled them with white shellac, and they are now in condition to be preserved always, a specimen of the grand old bison of the Pleistocene time. Now their burial places are three thousand feet nearer the stars than the day they were buried there, as then the climate was semi-tropical and the land they roamed over near sea level. The largest pair of horn cores of a similar bison are preserved in the Cincinnati Natural History Museum. I copy from one of their records: “The most conspicuous figure on Plate IX, with immense horn cores, is of the long extinct broad-fronted bison. This specimen, by far the finest of its kind in existence, is the greatest prize in the Cincinnati Museum. It was found in 1869 on Brush Creek, Brown County, Ohio, and through the efforts of Dr. O. D. Norton it was acquired by the Museum in 1875.” It gives me great pleasure to show my readers a photograph of the Kansas form that measures along the curve of the horn cores a foot and a half more than the famous Ohio specimen. (Fig. 43.)