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Chapter Twenty-Three
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23 I T RAINED ALL DAY on September 8, which was the sour cherry atop a daub of sour cream. Mud Springs, where we had been trying to work, "was named by a local with an aptitude for accurate nomenclature," Brown remarked . "We can stay here mired down in this clay country for days. Or we can use the paved road and run away from all this. We've got to have a look at the Bridger anyhow, before we go home. Let's look at it now." The idea wore well. There might even be better weather a bit west. Baxter Basin, after all, was giving us a case of outdoor cabin fever, and the Bridger Formation would be a change of diet fossil-wise. Not that we were bored with dinosaurs ; it was just that after a diet of something heavy one is intrigued by a bit of parsley or perhaps a carrot stick. Bridger was above the Mesozoic, above the Age of Dinosaurs. Up in the time of the mammals. It would be nice, for a change, to find bones we could lift, that is, if we found bones. Like the early horse, the oreodont, even one of the early rhinos. The latter were big enough, but compared with dinosaurs they would look manageable. Taking both truck and Buick, we left Rock Springs behind us. Ahead to our right White Mountain slowly rose out of the plain. A greenish grey cliff, with outcrops of reddish grey sandstone, rising above the Mesaverde, took us into Tertiary time. We passed the pinkish Wasatch, sort of a foothill to White Mountain. The road followed the cliff into Green River, named for the turbulent stream we crossed. Just beyond town the highway climbed the cliff across the face of the Green River shale and led us on past rounded hills, the first available vestiges of the Bridger. At first they were vestiges only, but gradually the greenish grey beds grew more abundant, the colors more vivid. A 118 long ridge on our left was well-exposed and looked to us like good hunting ground, but Brown urged us on. "Granger collected here a couple of seasons," he told us. "Other collectors have come and gone; this has been pretty well worked over." Finally he spotted a site he felt looked worth a look. "We'll try it here until lunch time; if we don't hit something by then, we'll shove along." It was nearly eleven o'clock then. We each picked out a section we could cover in an hour and went our separate ways. My chosen route took in a few low mounds around a small butte, bare and weathered, bare haystacks much like some of the Cloverly around Howe Ranch. The surfaces were hard and crusty, covered with loose pebbles that made walking tricky. It was, however, possible to look over several yards on both sides at a fair pace. I could just see myself coming upon a slender bone from the little Eohippus, the dawn horse. It was a good time and place for Lady Luck to deal us a fresh hand. The Eohippus, such a dainty little thing with his full set of toes and about the size of a fox, was so much more endearing than the great dinosaurs . And here they had gambolled about in the sun when these green beds were water-borne sands. The first bone fragment I came upon was flat and roughly rectangular, and shortly I came upon several like pieces that seemed to fit together. Looking for a lovely little horse, a dainty mammal, I had come upon the leftover covering of a prosaic turtle. The turtle is one of God's best time-travellers; he was here before the dinosaurs came on the scene; he survived their passing. But somehow, because they were so common all through their time, turtle fossils are not much more exciting than turtle lives must be. I looked about the top of the stone haystack and found half a dozen piles of long-unused turtle carapaces, fellows that for whatever cause had all died here together. Brown came up to me. "Any luck?" I asked. "Turtle fragments." He smiled wearily. When we gathered back at the car for lunch, Bob and Gil and Dan had shared our own luck. Lewis brought in the broken end of a small femur and a few assorted limb bones of an animal that couldn't have...