“The task of removing and mounting the bones has required the labor of Mr. H. T. Martin the larger part of a year, and is as finally mounted, an example of great labor and skill on his part.... The skeleton, as mounted, is just ten feet in length. The neck in life must have been thick and heavy at the base. The trunk was broad; the abdominal region short between the girdles; the short tail was thick at its base. The species was named in honor of Professor H. F. Osborn, of Columbia University.”
In his introduction Dr. Williston speaks of the great scientific value of this specimen of the plesiosaurian family, of which he says: “Thirty-two species and fifteen genera have been described from the United States, and in not a single instance has there been even a considerable part of the skeleton made known.”
I am glad that the University of Kansas owns this splendid denizen of her ancient Cretaceous sea.
My collection in the Royal Museum of Munich is said by Dr. H. F. Osborn to be the finest prepared collection of Kansas Chalk and Texas Permian vertebrates in the world. A recent letter from my friend Dr. Broili, an assistant there, says that the collection contains over eighty-five distinct species of extinct vertebrates. Among these, there are eighteen species and seven genera new to science. Seven papers have been published describing this material, by J. C. Merriam, A. R. Crook, Charles R. Eastman, F. B. Loomis, F. Broili, L. Neumayer, and L. Strickler, respectively; and it has been illustrated by forty plates. The lamented German paleontologist, Dr. Carl von Zittel, under whom I served the Munich museum for several years, wrote me that I had erected here “an immemorial monument” to my name.
Here rests, far from its native shores, the most complete skeleton of the Cretaceous shark, _Oxyrhina mantelli_ Agassiz, ever discovered in any formation. It formed the basis for the inaugural address delivered by Charles R. Eastman before the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.
I discovered this specimen while conducting an expedition for Dr. von Zittel. I was entirely alone, and camping on one of the ravines that score the southern slope of the Smoky Hill valley, south of Buffalo Park. I had already found a number of flattened disks, the centra of fish vertebræ, which Dr. Williston had assured me belonged to a species of shark, as he had found teeth associated with them. I was delighted, therefore, to find here a continuous string of them leading into a low knoll. I quickly shoveled away the loose chalk and cleaned up the floor, to find the whole column, nearly twenty in length; while the skull was represented by great plates of cartilaginous bone, containing some two hundred and fifty teeth from the roof and floor of the mouth. The larger teeth were over an inch long and covered with a shining, dark-colored enamel. They were as sharp and polished as in life, and lay in or near their natural positions.