Part 15 (1/2)
”Bully! I'd like to fly over a glacier, too, and see what it looks like.
Can you go that high?”
”I--guess so. Never tried it! We will, though!”
”Gee! Wouldn't this be a great way to teach geography--from an aeroplane!”
”Sure would!--Great way to go camping, too.”
”'S right, only--it would be if there was just the two of us,” sighed Ted ungrammatically. ”Could you carry enough grub?”
”We could get fresh supplies every few days, from some ranch.”
The next day they went back for the rest of the party and showed them Ted's fossil, entering the cave the way Radcliffe had left it. Norris had spent one summer with fossil hunters in the dry gullies of the Southern end of California, he told them, where through scorching days and thirsty nights they had searched for any bit of bone that might lie amid the shale or imbedded in strata the edges of which might be seen on the face of a sun-baked bluff. The summer before, a group of geology men from a rival University had actually camped within a hundred yards of what was later discovered to be a deposit of rare fossils. It was therefore with heightened satisfaction that their reconnaissance had resulted in the discovery and excavation, bone by bone, of the complete skeleton of several most interesting prehistoric monsters that had lain all these ages embedded in the shale.
One bone four feet long, he told them, and weighing several hundred pounds, had been found in fragments in the shale, but it had been fitted together again, done up in plaster bandages and braced with splints, quite as a surgeon treats a broken leg. Another, found embedded in solid rock, had to be s.h.i.+pped in the rock, each piece being numbered as it was removed from the cliff as an aid to fitting it together again. Then with hammer and chisel the delicate feat of cutting away the rock and leaving the bone exposed was slowly and painstakingly accomplished. Thus have the bones buried before ever man trod the earth been made to tell their story. Often it takes more than a single specimen to reconstruct for the scientist the whole of the creature, but relics of fully thirty Triceratops have been discovered in different parts of the world, and where one skull has a broken nose, another shows it intact, and so on through its entire anatomy.
Its habits may in part be reasoned out, as for instance, if its hind legs are disproportionately long, it likely walked erect at least sometimes.
”That, as it happens, was not the case with Triceratops,” he added.
”There was only a slight difference between his fore and hind legs.
Triceratops had teeth made for browsing, not for rending flesh; his single claw, round and blunt, does not indicate any pugnacious tendency on his part, and the solidity of his bones are found to-day in either a very sluggish animal or a partially aquatic one. The shape and rapid taper of the tail vertebrae indicates a rather short tail, round rather than flat,--ill adapted for swimming,--and so following through the list, till we have a Triceratops elephantine in general build, though more like a rhinoceros in face with a horn over his nose and two over his eyes, a horn-supported neck ruff, and a generally sluggish mode of life.
”In the coal fields complete imprints of Ichthyosauria have been found, doubtless due to the carbonization of the animal matter. And impressions have been left in stone of the very feathers worn by some of the now fossilized creatures.”
It was by comparison of fossil remains that the well known evolution of the horse from a little fellow the size of a fox was learned. Ted often thought of that three-toed Miocene horse, and the giant monsters of his time,--of the upthrust of the Rocky Mountains, cutting off the moist sea breeze from the marshy country to the Eastward and making desert of it.
This made life too hard for the heavy, slow-witted creatures, and they failed to survive the change. But the nimble footed little horse trotted long distances with ease, to find food and water.
Norris convulsed them by describing the creature on which he declared the aeroplane was modeled,--the pteranodon, that giant lizard, largest of flying creatures even in Mesozoic age, whose bat-like wings reached 20 feet from tip to tip,--as the fossil skeletons plainly prove.
This interesting specimen was a link in the chain between the birds of to-day and their ancestral archeopteryx, no larger than a crow whose front legs metamorphosed to short wings, whose skeletons have been found perfectly preserved in the limestone.
Ted was frantic for fear they would not find the place again, then could hardly wait to hear the Geological Survey man's p.r.o.nouncement on his find. Norris chipped and chipped, with knife and hammer, till he had uncovered the impress of a great, membranous wing.
It was a fossil dinosaur,--a pterodactyl!
Ted's college education was secure!
CHAPTER X
HOW THE EARTH WAS MADE
Ted's fossil would have to wait to be exhumed. In fact, Norris told him, he could sell it as it stood, and let the purchaser do the work. Then it occurred to him to wonder if Ted would not have first to take up a claim,--for it was Government land. Anyway, he would see to it that the boy was rewarded for his find.
The fire now being extinguished, Radcliffe had flown to other battle lines, first taking Rosa--as she insisted--back to her fire outlook. The plan was for the two boys to keep on hunting for the Mexicans, (as the harried Ranger now counted on their doing), joining the rest of the camping party every night, at points they would agree upon. But first, Ace had made a flight to Fresno for supplies and to start his pilot home by train. He then carried them one at a time to where the burros had been left,--and where the lazy rascals still browsed on the rich mountain meadows.
For a day or two, all the boys could talk, think or dream about was the adventures they had just been through. But at last they had relieved their minds to some extent, and one evening around the fire, Norris gave them his long promised explanation of some of the natural wonders they had seen.