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THE WALL WILL NEVER support all three of those heavy blocks," Mr. Johnson said. The engineer in charge of installing large exhibits in the American Museum of Natural History shook his head. The huge track slab from the States-Hall Mine was in New York, but the problem of displaying it was still unsolved. An upright wall panel was being considered. "Well, we could cast the two upper sections in plaster," Brown suggested, "and retain only the bottom original." The casting required weeks. Bob Chaffee and Jerry Walsh handled the job. I knew what it was like to wrestle with the three-ton blocks, so I was quite pleased that preparation of the big palm leaf took up my time and attention. The replicas came from the moulds in plaster dyed the color of the original rock. When all three sections were up and joined, and joints along the contacting edges smoothed with dyed plaster, the illusion was perfect. This section of transplanted mine roof, the two great tracks showing the fIfteenfoot stride of the mystery dinosaur, greeted the visitor at the east end of Cretaceous Dinosaur Hall. It made a fine addition to Brown's track collection. And the bottom block, original stone, solid and real, resisted the finger nails and pen knives of the public. The shining black frond of the big palm leaf was set in a wall case next to the head and neck of the biggest Howe Quarry sauropod, where it would always be to me reminder of an unforgettable adventure. Every once in a while I found an excuse to walk past the case. Now the 1937 trip was part ofthe past, I was thankful none ofus had come to harm in that mine. But standing before this magnificent shining black fan I knew I would run the same risks again if necessary, to gather in such a superb specimen. The black palm leaf held a special place in my memory bank too because once, standing there looking at it with me when it was being set up in its case, Barnum Brown told me, "R. T., there's hardly a fossil you can't go out in the field and bring home as well as I." I owed more than I could ever pay to that man. Under Brown I found myself accepted by the circle in which he and my father moved. Dr. Walter Granger put in my name for the Explorer's Club. The New York Academy ofSciences carried me as a student member from the days when I had attended Gregory's classes in comparative anatomy. My geology was somewhat catch-as-catch-can, but under Barnum I had been helped to grasp its rudiments as applied to fossil-garnering. The spring of 1938 warmed to new life the dormant trees of Central Park and the museum grounds. Concurrently, it brought back the old itch; each day it grew harder to go inside to work. Getting bones dressed up for the public wasn't near as much fun as fmding them. "We'll get away shortly, R. T.," Barnum told me, sensing my restlessness. There was no money for a big expedition, but he and I planned to spend the summer on the Cloverly in Montana. The warmth ofJune and the heat ofJuly and the postponements growing out of moving from inside job to insidejob made things more and more intolerable. I was becoming a paycheck-worker going over and over from the fifteenth to the thirtieth and back. With each paycheck, two more weeks of the hunting season had gone to pot. Desperately , I approached Barnum with a proposition. "What do you say I take the old Buick and get started down on the Crow Indian Reservation?" I suggested. "Maybe I could find something." He fell in with the idea more easily than I had hoped. "It's been a while since I collected there. More skeletons should be weathered out by now." He pulled a number of aerial photos showing Cloverly exposures from his desk drawer. He laid his finger on a spot where the edge of a long butte weathered down into highly dissected badlands. "Right there," he pointed out, "is where Pete Kaisen and I took out five skeletons from five different quarries, after I thought I'd cleaned the place out years before. It's within walking distance from Cashen's Ranch." He moved his finger to the other side of the butte. "And here...

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