The Dinosaurs of Wyoming - Wyoming State Geological Survey ...

xu PREFACE
that's a dinosaur, and whoever heard of a dinosaur in marine
sediments? We must save every scrap of bone." The
material was unlovely to look at, but we wrapped the scraps
in newspaper and packed it for shipment. This material was
the type of Stegopelta landerensis, the only dinosaur Williston
ever named. He then turned this unvvelcome "mess"
over to me for description. Many were the weary hours I
spent trying to find a "fit" in the broken bones. This was my
initiation into vertebrate paleontology.
In later years when I began a study of the evidences of
disease and injury in ancient times, the first specimen I
studied was a fossil tumor, a haemangioma, involving two
caudal backbones of a huge dinosaur which had been collected
in the Como Beds of Wyoming by Dr. Williston.
Many books and papers have been written about dinosaurs.
A list of the titles alone would fill many printed pages, but we
are constantly learning something new about the dinosaurs
and we will not learn the complete story for a long time to
come. There are doubtless hundreds of dinosaurs still embedded
in the rocks of Wyoming, some of which will come to
light and add new knowledge.
The list of books, memoirs and papers on dinosaurs given
below, is not a complete compilation of the printed works on
Wyoming dinosaurs, but it gives a clue to the readily available
sources of information from which the interested student can
read further to the limit of paleontological information. Many
impQrtant and interesting publications written in foreign languages
are omitted. Dinosaurs have lived in every continent
on the globe, and everywhere they attract attention, and someone
has written something interesting about them everywhere.
Dinosaurs, the world around, are reptiles of the Mesozoic;
that middle era of geological time between the Paleozoic and
the Cenozoic. Although dinosaurians are known from the first
period of this era-the Triassic-yet we never found a single
scrap of a dinosaur in the massive Red Beds (Permian and
Triassic) which are so conspicuous a figure of the landscape
along the eastern foothills of the Wind River Mountains. The
dinosaurs of Wyoming are all Cretaceous and Comanchean,
covering a large period of time reckoned in millions of years.
The Como Beds of the Lower Cretaceous, known also as the
Morrison Formation or Atlantosaurus Beds, yield the greatest
number of dinosaurs, as will be told later on.
I am under obligations to Professor R. S. Lull, Professor
of Paleontology at Yale University for the loan of cuts illus-