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14 A WARM SEPTEMBER afternoon. I was at work refming the job on some incompletely cleaned bones. Otto Falkenbach stopped by my desk. "Charlie Lang says he's found something downstairs he wants looked at. Want to come along?" It was a welcome suggestion. Museum work was never dull, but when a job goes on long enough, it gets tedious. Otto picked up a can of shellac. "Better bring your brush and cup," he added. We took the elevator to the basement. Otto led the way along a lengthy cavernous passage under the welter of pipes that supply the museum's life blood-water, steam, electricity-to the floors of this tremendous red barn. Charlie was nowhere in sight. We came to a locked door. Otto's keys took us into a great dark room smelling of musty straw and long-undisturbed dust. He found a light switch, and the bulbs revealed piles of unopened boxes stacked about the walls. Under thick coats of dust were labels, names and dates of expeditions many of which had taken place before I was born. Boxes close by bore the label, "Belly River Cretaceous," a name I associated with Brown's work in Alberta long ago. Others were tagged "Bone Cabin Quarry," where Brown had unearthed the first brontosaur in 1897. Otto looked around carefully. "Not here," he said. "Charlie must have taken it to the room across from the old print shop." I followed him back through another of the mile-long passages that were part of this underground labyrinth. We passed before another door, and again Otto's keys let us through. The room we entered was partly lighted by high windows, but back in the shadowy corners it was difficult to see. Otto flicked on another switch. A framework of 81 iron supports holding large removable racks ran from floor to ceiling. The racks were loaded with hundreds and hundreds of dinosaur bones, most of them duplicates of skeletons on exhibition in Dinosaur Hall. Many were simply too incomplete to merit mounting. Here was stored an extra skeleton of a tyrannosaur, the great limb bones and the teeth of the lower jaw just visible over the edge of a rack. Here were the dorsal vertebrae, as big as washtubs, from a brontosaur. The skeleton of a mosasaur, a great sea monster, lay dismembered nearby. All in all, there seemed to be more material here than in all the upstairs. Otto still didn't fmd what he was looking for. "They must have taken it to the new Dinosaur Hall after all," he said. We set out again on our underground walk, presently coming to the basement of the new Roosevelt Memorial Wing. We took the elevator to the fourth floor. The new Jurassic Dinosaur Hall stretched before us. Brown planned soon to move all the Triassic and Jurassic dinosaurs into these new quarters, leaving those of the Cretaceous ... dinosaurian twilight time ... in the old and now quite crowded hall. But at the time, the room was being used for storage. Down at the far end, loaded on platform trucks, we saw three or four large wooden boxes from which the tops had been removed. "This must be it," Otto said. We crossed the tiled floor, our shoes clicking loudly in the silent room. The boxes contained large blocks of sandstone, from which plaster and bandages had been partly stripped away, revealing bone buried in the matrix below. A whole animal, but for the skull, seemed to be here, the bones perfectly articulated. A label lay in each box. The label read, "Monoclonius skeleton, collected Alberta 1914." The bones were in fme condition but dried out from long standing. Otto opened his can of shellac, and we set to work flooding the thin fluid along the bones. "This is a very fine thing everyone had forgotten was here," Otto remarked. For the first time in years, Brown had begun an inventory of old material. The museum planned to dispose of some of its surplus by giving it to schools or colleges. Skeletons of excellent exhibition value, such as this Monoclonius, could be traded or sold to other institutions. We had a fine Monodonius already on display in Dinosaur Hall. The creature was a close relative and quite similar to Triceratops. A day or two later Charlie and Jerry came into the lab wheeling a truck loaded with four or five trays of wrapped packages, which they piled on Otto's table...

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