I met with one experience in the Chalk of western Kansas, last August, that I shall not soon forget. I had some pleasure in looking for the first time upon a perfect skeleton of a very rare animal, that once lived in the Cretaceous ocean. My great sorrow was that I could not save it in the condition in which I found it, to grace the museum of one of our large universities, where it would have been cared for and highly prized. - It was, I believe, the only perfect skeleton ever seen by anyone, except myself, and those few persons who chanced to pass, when I had, after several days, succeeded in brushing off the loose chalk and impure gypsum in which it was entombed.
       I bad no camera and am not an artist, or I could have given great pleasure to many authorities in paleontology by picturing it as it lay exposed to the but sun, which had not looked down upon it for millions of years, since, full of life and motion, it was the “boatman of the Cretaceous ocean,” now known to science as Cope’s Protostega gigas, “the first great roof,”—The largest of all sea turtles.
       This was a perfect skeleton, lying in a low wash in Gove County, Kan., only a few inches below the surface in material that had become disintegrated, and in which the peculiar shrub that lives in the chalk and shale beds, had been living in luxury, covering the bones with a compact mess of rootlets, eating up the hard outer surface, and would eventually have entirely consumed it, had I not happened along to tear them away. To add to my sorrows, the bones themselves bad been broken to pieces by the uplift of the strata, and were covered with a thin layer of blue clay, that also filled the cracks; this acted like mortar. It could not be brushed off without bringing up fragments, and it prevented me from covering the bones in sections with starched paper, or cloth, to strengthen and hold the fragments in place, so they could be taken up, restored and mended in the laboratory, as the damp starch would have loosened the clay and left the bones behind.
     For hours, I thought of every conceivable plan I could adopt to save the skeleton entire, as I had uncovered it, but had to give it up, and took up several hundred pounds of fragments, that will require the patience of Job and great skill to restore the skeleton more or less complete.