f New Mexico, the since famous Permian deposits. He naturally
explored the same beds at Canyon City, immediately below the dinosaur
deposits, and soon found the still very problematical _Hallopus_
skeleton, at their very top, a specimen which after nearly forty years
remains unique of its kind.

A few years earlier Professor Marsh, on his way east from the Tertiary
deposits of western Wyoming, had stopped at Como, Wyoming, to observe
the strange salamanders, or "fish with legs" as they were widely
known, so abundant in the lake at that place, about whose
transformations he later wrote a paper, perhaps the only one on modern
vertebrates that he ever published. While he was there Mr. Carlin, the
station agent, showed him some fossil bone fragments, so Mr. Reed told
me, that they had picked up in the vicinity, and about which Professor
Marsh made some comments. But he was so engrossed with the other
discoveries he was then making that he did not follow up the
suggestion. Had he done so the discovery of the "Jurassic Dinosaurs"
would have been made five years earlier.

Mr. Reed, tramping over the famous Como hills after game--he had been
a professional hunter of game for the construction camps of the Union
Pacific Railroad--in the winter and spring of 1877, observed some
fossil bones just south of the railway station that excited his
curiosity. But he and Mr. Carlin did not make their discovery known to
Professor Marsh till the following autumn, and then under assumed
names, fearing that they would be robbed of their discovery. I was
sent to Como in November of 1877 from Canyon City. I got off the train
at the station after midnight, and enquired for the nearest
hotel--(the station comprised two houses only), and where I could find
Messrs. Smith and Robinson. I was told that the section house was the
only hotel in the place and that these gentlemen lived in the country
and that there was no regular bus-line yet running to their ranch. A
freshly opened box of cigars, however, helped clear up things, and I
joined Mr. Reed the next day in opening "Quarry No. 1" of the Como
hills. Inasmuch as the mercury in the thermometer during the next two
months seldom reached zero--upward I mean--the opening of this famous
deposit was made under difficulties. That so much "head cheese," as we
called it, was shipped to Professor Marsh was more the fault of the
weather and his importunities than our carelessness. However, we found
some of