In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE LONG TABLE in Brown's office was littered with maps and aerial photographs . He had just held a press conference. I floated by the open door, treading lightly on clouds; winter had come and gone; the air was charged with plans for a new expedition. We were to head out in a few days. The press conference was a prelude to the fanfare of publicity that spoke of a full-fledged party. Next morning the story appeared in the papers . A three-toed footprint of giant size had been found on the roof of a coal mine, the Chesterfield, in Utah. The creature that made it, the paper said, was pronounced by Brown to be "unknown to science ." No skeletal trace of this giant had ever been found. But before this expedition was done, before the season was over, we hoped to bring back some of the bones of this mystery dinosaur. I read the accounts over and over for the exuberant feeling they gave me. The much-publicized track was on exhibition in the Seventy-Seventh Street foyer, thoroughly photographed at the time of the press conference, and the pictures accompanied the articles. I was downstairs packing when the phone rang. Louis Monaco, of Brown's office, was on the line. "Sorry to interrupt, R. T.," he said. "Hoped I would catch you there. Can you be in the foyer at two o'clock? Matter of more pies, this time for Sinclair. Brown will be there. Bob Chaffee. Gil Stucker. Erich Schlaikjer, if we can fmd him. Don't forget. " Schlaikjer, of Brooklyn College, had been in and out of the museum lately, planning to join the trip west. Gil Stucker, a new man, was going along. Bob Chaffee, my classmate as well as lab companion, was also to go along. Don Guadagni and Ted Lewis were also to accompany us, but so 17 96 far neither had shown up in New York. The Sinclair Oil people had again kicked in generously toward an expedition, and these pictures were for their own special use. At the appointed hour I found everyone, including Brown, rallied around the footprint. Chaffee and I were given a yardstick, and we went through the motions of measuring the print, while Brown and Stucker pretended to look on. Thirtytwo inches across, black as night with the print of coal. The label described it as the "biggest footprint on record." There were no signs of claws on it, but the great pads gave it some affinity with the Iguanodon, a bipedal second cousin, in a way, of the Trachodon. Brown estimated the creature may have stood twenty-five or thirty feet high. We were starting out in search ofa spectacular animal indeed. Our first destination was Rock Springs, Wyoming . Here were outcrops of the same formation as that in which the giant track had been found. This formation, the Mesaverde, was Cretaceous in age, dating eighty million years back, but no dinosaurs had ever been collected in this particular horizon. It was an extensive series ofsandstones, clays and coal seams aggregating to a thickness of two thousand feet in places. It covered hundreds of square miles in southern Wyoming, western Colorado and eastern Utah. The bone outcrop ncar Rock Springs that Brown had located in 1934 on his aerial survey and which he had so long hoped to work might well prove to hold the bones of our mystery dinosaur. It was planned that I would set off for Rock Springs with the advance party and establish camp. Brown hoped to follow by the end ofthe week, and Schlaikjer and Lewis would follow as their respective colleges closed. "When you get to Rock Springs," Brown ad- vised me, "look up Dr. Lauzer at the local hospital. He was mayor of the town once, and is a man of some influence there. He'll take you out and show you the bone outcrop. If there's anything you need or want, he's your man." Brown continued, "Then there's the steam shovel. The Union Pacific writes me they can deliver it on the siding near the foot of Number Five Hill within the next few days." This was good news. Brown had been negotiating for the use of a machine to strip away the overburden, somewhat similar to what we used at Howe Quarry. That the Union Pacific had been generous enough to donate a power shovel to our cause would mean elimination of a...

Share