When they had been packed with excelsior in strong boxes, a wagon was backed up against the level platform which we had made in throwing out the rock and soil that lay over the specimen. The boxes were then set on edge, and, with the help of boards and rollers, loaded into the wagon for shipment to the railroad thirty miles away.
But my troubles with this specimen were not over; on the contrary, they had just begun. When the section containing the head was being raised on to a table in my shop it fell and its weight was so great that the head was badly shattered, as was the plaster that secured the bones in place below.
Then all through the winter, while I was trying to dry out the specimen, so that it could be cleaned and prepared for shipment, the rats, which inhabited the walls of the laboratory in great numbers, kept pulling out the bran and excelsior that had been put around the delicate bones to protect them; thus causing the broken plaster, with the bones of the head, to sink lower and lower, as the packing was carried away from underneath.
FIG. 11.—RESTORATION OF KANSAS CRETACEOUS ANIMALS.
(From drawing by S. Prentice, after Williston.)
_a_, _Uintacrinus socialis_; _b_, _Clidastes velox_; _c_, _Ornithostoma ingens_. ]
FIG. 12.—GIANT CRETACEOUS FISH, _Portheus molossus_ (above), compared with a six-foot modern Tarpon (below).
By courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. ]
Driven to think out some plan of saving the specimen from destruction, I conceived the idea of shoving a number of wooden pegs of various lengths under the broken fragments, so as to push them up into their places and hold them firmly there. All the excelsior was then taken away from beneath them, a frame of lumber made around the section, and the whole space filled with plaster which held all the broken bones in place.
In this specimen I found for the first time a complete column of eighty-five vertebræ, a very important find, as these vertebræ are of so nearly the same size that in restoring an incomplete specimen there was no way of estimating how many of them there ought to be, and for anything to the contrary, one might go on adding them indefinitely, as a certain man in Europe added an enormous number to his mounted specimen of a _Zeuglodon_.