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IT WAS THE SIXTEENTH day of December 1938 when I brought the museum's venerable Buick in through Holland Tunnel and turned toward home. I felt well-pleased. I had been able to postpone return to the city and with great justification . Discovery of the sauropod tracks in the Paluxy had gone a long way to ameliorate the let-down feeling that often comes with the end of a field trip. It hadn't been a discovery, really, ofcourse; they had been known since man had found his way into the Texas hill country. It was my good luck to recognize them for what they were. Only the three-toed dinosaur tracks had been known, for just under a hundred years, as the calling cards of dinosaurs. As for the great plantigrade sauropod tracks, the Paluxy tracks were the first known in the world. Barnum was not yet back from Alberta when I got to the museum, but he had been expected for so long that he was bound to show up soon. My two casts had arrived by express and had been laid out and exclaimed over by one and all. I couldn't wait for Barnum to get back, because I knew he would somehow find a way to solve my big problem when he saw them. "R.T., we simply have to get a set of those, original, not a plaster cast," he said, just before Christmas. It made for a nice Christmas. But in the spring of 1939, after the Paluxy had been up and down, it wasn't a Texas expedition that Barnum outlined; it was one back to Alberta. "The Texas thing will have to be put off until funds are available," Brown said. "And in Alberta we'll be doing work for the Sinclair people. The Sinclair people are in the oil business, not the footprint business. Harry Sinclair has been a good old angel to scientists, and when he bought the brontosaur and drove it to work in ads, he did the dinosaur tribe a lot of good. So it's no more than fair that from time to time we give him what he wants." All in all, the Alberta season was a good trip and good for me. Much of it was spent in collecting from times back of dinosaur time. And a fair bit of it was spent in making the acquaintance of the Canadian dinosaur contingent. Without the lure of the great sauropod tracks away down south in Texas, it would have been a wonderful, valuable, broadening season. As it was, all Alberta was only a restraint on getting back to where my heart and my footprints were. As usual, I made my way back to New York circuitously . Collecting invertebrates around Moose Dome and Emerald Lake. Down on the Red Deer River I got acquainted with Styracosaurus, Monoclonius , other assorted Cretaceous dinosaurs. In the fall, a pleasant assignment in the Sweet Grass Hills of Montana. I left Hell Creek for home just in front of the winter's first big snow. In New York unexpected good news was awaiting me. Brown had nearly completed arrangements for getting at the sauropod tracks. He had negotiations under way with Dr. E. H. Sellards to work in conjunction with Texas Statewide Paleontological Survey and the University of Texas. Material collected would be split between the University and the American Museum. One drawback: it was now December. The Paluxy was temperamental in the winter, often on into spring. In an open quarry, I might well find myself in a bad way. I mentioned this, but Brown, who hadn't seen the trash deposited high in the trees along the Paluxy's banks, felt if he wrapped up the thing with the Texas powers, we should grab it when we could. ''I'm after Harry Sinclair to give us a hand with the museum's end of the thing," he said. With Brown pulling the strings, my worries raveled out a bit. Then a letter came in from a Frank Davenport of Wilkes-Barre, telling Brown of the discovery of "the oldest footprints in the world" on the roofofa coal mine there. Would the museum like to come and verify it, bless the fmd, do the right thing about helping the local folks beat the drum for such a fmd? Wilkes-Barre coal was Paleozoic, a hundred million years back of the dinosaurs. It was in Paleozoic time the fIrst amphibians crawled...

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