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31 BACK IN BROWN'S OFFICE I listened to my chief outline plans. All work in Wilkes-Barre was laid aside for the time, worthwhile though it was. I was to leave for Texas immediately , but not for Glen Rose. Brown told me, "E. H. Sellards, of the Texas state department, tells me two young geologists just found a new sauropod trail down in Bandera County, near San Antonio. They were checking out the story of a couple oflocal kids who thought they had found elephant tracks. The conditions may be more favorable for removal than the Glen Rose tracks." The abrupt change in plans didn't matter to me; the basic story was on the front burner now anyway. The Glen Rose story, which had lain fallow and unplowed a half-century, had now been widely reported in Time and Natural History. This shot of publicity had, of course, set people to hunting tracks of the big flat-foots in a way they had never been sought before; it was natural they would be found elsewhere than at Glen Rose. Time would undoubtedly turn up sauropod tracks in other places. "This new site," Brown went on, "is in the bed of Hondo Creek, a little stream practically dry most of the year. The track-bearing ledge, which also carries carnosaur tracks, is high and nearly always above water." Dr. Sellards himself had not seen the new track find, but this seemed of no consequence. If in the end the Glen Rose site seemed for any reason preferable as a source of tracks for the museum, we could go either way. I was anxious to see the new find. "One way or another," Barnum said, "for one place or another, we'll want a complete double stride. We'll put it on the base of the brontosaur mount, under the tail." We went downstairs to measure the space. The idea, I thought, was a stroke of genius on Barnum's part. The Texas sauropods, in any case, were not Brontosaurus itself. But they were the same basic type of animal, roughly the same build. And they had made their footprints in the sands and mud of early Cretaceous time with meat-bearing feet; to the viewer, the skeleton feet of Barnum's brontosaur should come close to seeming the right size. It wouldn't do to have the brontosaur look as if his feet were pinched in his tracks, but we felt this unlikely . This, of course, would be a matter of concern only after we got the tracks. The yardstick told us we had a space twentynine feet long and eight feet wide between the hind feet of Barnum's giant and the end of the platform. With the contemplated slab in place, it would appear the mounted skeleton, as a living creature, had just walked out of his footprints. A week later I parked the Buick in front of the office of Dr. E. H. Sellards in Austin, Texas. The man with whom Brown had negotiated the deal betwen the museum and the Texas state department was Sellards's assistant, Glen Evans. Sellards told me, "Evans has made all the arrangements. Ten laborers will report for work tomorrow at the Bandera courthouse. Downstairs, you'll fmd all the tools you'll need." I felt as Brown must have felt when the Union Pacific put a steam shovel at his disposal in an earlier day: the world was mine, all mine, and there was nothing I couldn't do. As for cutting out two simple blocks-nothing to it; a simple excavation problem. Of course, I hadn't seen the Bandera tracks yet, but that little detail was a mere matter of time. Off to Bandera! It was only a few hours between Austin and Bandera. The area was very much like Glen Rose, still a part of the Texas hill country, the same cedars clothing the same sort of slopes found about Jim Ryals's farm outside Glen Rose. The same limestones here represented the same offshore muds of long ago; these low Texas hills had been beach on an expanded Gulfof Mexico at the same time as the Glen Rose area. When I looked out the hotel window next morning, snow was falling. For Bandera County in southern Texas, snow was as much a novelty as it is in Mexico City. Inside the dreary corridor of the little courthouse, I found waiting for me not ten but...

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