History: Wyoming’s Prehistory

Skull at the Museum at the Bighorns, Sheridan. (vannoy photo)

Wyoming’s landscape wasn’t always sagebrush and short grass, with rolling hills and steep mountains. At one time Wyoming was a tropical paradise, full of exotic reptiles, flying lizard-like creatures, and, later, huge mammoths and saber-tooth cats. Many scientists wanted to be the first to collect these ancient specimens for their colleges.

From 1877 until 1892, after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, there was another war being fought in Wyoming. It did not involve guns or fort of cannons, but bones. More specifically, fossil bones. Dubbed the Bone Wars, it was a time of intense and competitive fossil hunting in the West. Two paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope, scientist from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh, the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, used bribery, theft, and even the destruction of bones to try to out do each other.

The Rawlins Republican, August 23, 1895 – E. D. Cope, professor of pretology at the University of Pennsylvania, today shipped to that institution three large boxes of specimens and fossils. The shipment contains some very rare petrifactions and curios.

And this about Professor Marsh, in the Cheyenne Daily Leader, August 17, 1887 – Prof. Marsh, of Yale college, is about to ship East a mammoth fossil which was recently unearthed in the vicinity of Rock Creek. Wyo. Five men have been excavating for the find two years.

In The Wyoming Commonwealth, Cheyenne, December 28, 1890, it talks about the animals that once roamed this part of North America.

Professor G. E. Bailey, of the School of mines of Dakota, in conversation with an Omaha Bee reporter, gives vivid description of the bad land region…. which description is alike applicable to many sections of Wyoming, north and west of us……

Once down and the region is vast inland sea or lake, 110 miles long northeast to southwest, and from fifteen to forty miles wide. The bottom of this lake has been the playground of the forces of nature for ages. Rain, wind and frost have carved the whole region into more fantastic, weird forms than human brain could conceive.

“To the scientist the place is one of indescribable fascination, wonderland from the first drawing of life on this globe. The rocky layers now carved into marvelous imitation of the work of human hands were once ooze at the bottom of the lake and are now the richest treasure house in the entire world of well-preserved ancient animal life from which such men as Professors Liedy, Cope and others have dug some of the strangest and most wonderful freaks of animal life, the reading of their reports is more weird than the Arabian Nights.

In turn this region has been the home of land and water animals of such gigantic size as has never been discovered elsewhere in the deposits of the geological age. Lizard-like forms over 100 feet in length and 30 feet high have crawled over the plains. Reptiles, more hideous than the standard sea serpent, bathed their fifty foot bodies in the inland sea, stretching their necks twenty feet in the air. Flying reptiles with thirty foot spread of feathery wings disputed possession of the air with gigantic birds whose vast jaws were armed with monstrous teeth. Two, three and four-toed horses from the size of a fox to those much larger than any of today, sought food in the weird wilderness.

“Tropical climates followed the drying up of the waters, and the palms grew and the crocodile, tapir, rhinoceros, elephant, mastodon, and even camels, lived and died within these boundaries. Their fossil bones are everywhere mingled with petrified shells of turtles, shells ten feet wide. Mammoth shells of the ammonite, with the pearl all as perfect as the day when it spread its fleshly sails to the cretaceous breeze, are there. Huge masses of fossil oysters awaken longings for the comforts of civilization.

These remains of extinct animals were prized by geologists and paleontologists world wide. Wyoming was and still is a hot-bed of fossilized bones of dinosaurs and ancient mammals.

The Wheatland World, July 28, 1899 – Exhuming a Brontosaurus. (From the Sun-Leader) The Union Pacific scientific expedition has already met with gratifying success in the discovery of the bones of abrontosaurus in Wyoming. This huge lizard, a genus of the American dinosaur of the Jurassic period, lived, moved and had its being at an age when the earth was very hot, when the climate of Wyoming and the Laramle plain- was similar to that of the tropics and the vegetation resembled the palms chiefly found in the torrid zones of Asia and America.

It is thought this brontosaur is one of the ‘ companions of that at Yale, discovered in Wyoming, and restored In 1891 by Prof. O. C. Marsh, if such is the fact this great reptile must have been in life more than 70 feet long and weighed upwards of 80,000 pounds.

One of the monsters, whose remains have been discovered in Wyoming, measures nearly 130 feel in length and about 35 feet in height at the hips, its skeleton weighs more than 10,000 pounds.

This expedition may well prove one of the most valuable of the century and may demonstrate that the Laramie plains was a sea or receptacle where the pro-Adamite creations fled for refuge, to be finally submerged and overwhelmed by the awful cataclysms that destroyed the firmament of the atmosphere and wiped out every vestige of life on the earth.

When the scientists put together the bones to create a prehistoric skeleton, there was always the possibility of errors, and some might wonder if they have them right, such as this in the The Wyoming Press, July 28, 1900 – Forms of Prehistoric Animals. Visitors to museums of science are always Interested in the mounted skeletons of gigantic extinct animals, but they seldom appreciate the amount of study and skill required to properly match the fossil bones together. Even at the best it seems probable that many mistakes are made, and extinct monsters may sometimes be caused to assume forms and attitudes unknown to them in life. This is indicated, not only by the differences between the restorations made by various naturalists, but by a recent remark of Prof. H. C. Osborn, an expert in the mounting of fossil skeletons, that if we had had nothing but the skeleton of the elephant to work upon, we should probably have obtained a very faulty conception of the animal.

More and more discoveries help scientists to recreate the animals from the bones. Sites like the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD and Ashfall Fossil Beds near Royal, NE, can show us what the complete skeletons look like.

Dinosaur bone hunting was a major undertaking in the late 1800’s, as this story about Professor Reed in The Pine Bluffs Post, January 17, 1913 – The most interesting sight at the University of Wyoming in the Museum of Natural History. The most interesting character at the University is William Harlow Reed, the fossil hunter, whose name is almost as well known in England and Germany as it is in America. Visitors at the Museum- and there are many of them— are seized with amazement and curiosity as they behold the huge remains of prehistoric animals, which inhabited our own fair state of Wyoming millions of years ago. Wyoming is the richest field in the world for fossil-hunters, and that is why Mr. Walter Granger of the American Museum of Natural History in New York city, goes hunting in this state summer— not for elk and sage hens, but for the coveted bonesof animals that lived on the earth a good long while before the advent of man. For the rarest fossil specimen the University of Wyoming has been offered some very fancy prices.

In the summer of 1909, the late Prof. W. C. Knight found the two saddles of a mighty plesiosiur in the Dutton oil basin, Fremont County, Wyoming, and for which a technical school at Freiburgh, Germany, at one time offered $10,000. The plesiosiur were marine reptiles and made their home in Wyoming about 38,000,000 years ago.

Another rare prize possessed by the University is the skeleton of a prehistoric camel, discovered, by Professor Reed in 1907 about thirty-five miles west of Casper. This camel lived about three million years ago and was the size of a modern fox terrier. For this specimen the University has refused $8,000.

The first discovery of the land-dwelling dinosaur to be found in the Rocky Mountain region was made in the year 1876 about sixty-five miles west of Laramie on the old Como bluff. Since then Prof. Reed has found a large number of dinosaur bones, having shipped train loads of them to the large museums in the east.

In the museum at the University of Wyoming can be seen the right hind leg of the largest land-living and air breathing animal that has yet been recorded and alongside of which the ancient mammoth would look pitiably small. This specimen was found by Mr. Reed at the north end of the Medicine Bow mouutainsm1904. Last month the University received a rare specimen of fossil fish, the gift of Mr. Patrick J. Queally of Kremmer, Wyo.

His red-letter day was in the year 1866, when he made his first dinosaur discovery, and he has been in the limelight ever since. Prof. Reed was on a reconnaissance trip with General Custer in 1874, and the two men parted only twelve hours before Custer met his fate at the hands of the Indians.

The first hunting was done in Wyoming by Prof. C. C. Marsh, of Yale university, in 1869. It was necessary at that time for the government to provide an escort of soldiers for protection against the Indians. When Prof. Reed first began to gather bones he had to carry them on his back for three or four hundred yards to the railroad track where they were placed on a small car used by section men and called a rubble car. The fossils were thus pushed to the depot, where they were boxed and shipped to some eastern museum.

Along about the year 1877 Prof. Red began to use pack horses for transporting fossils, but continue the practice for over two years. Thereafter for a number of years he pressed into service an old army ambulance, to which he would harness two pack horses. After experimenting with all kinds of wagons, Prof. Reed last summer purchased a light running automobile, which hat proved a boon to the fossil hunter at well as to other men whose work demands excessive travel. The system by which the remains of prehistoric animals are unearthed from their ancient resting place and are transported to the modern museum, has experienced an evolution both interesting and unique.

Today, fossil hunters have an easier time of it, with four-wheelers and pickups, but there is still a great deal of plain hard work. When you see a dinosaur skeleton in a museum, think back to a time when fossils were considered by some to be more valuable than gold, and cause their own kind of ‘rush’ to find the biggest and best bones.