Water Reptiles of the Past and Present

Synopsis

It was just forty years ago that the writer of these lines, then an assistant of his beloved teacher, the late Professor B. F. Mudge, dug from the chalk rocks of the Great Plains his first specimens of water reptiles, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. To the youthful collector, whose first glimpse of ancient vertebrate life had been the result of accident, these specimens opened up a new world and diverted the course of his life.

They were rudely collected, after the way of those times, for modern methods were impracticable with the rifle in one hand and the pick in the other. Nor was much known in those days of these or other ancient creatures, for the science of vertebrate paleontology was yet very young. There were few students of fossil vertebrates—Leidy, Cope, and Marsh were the only ones in the United States—and but few collectors, of whom the writer alone survives.

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