Page:A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere.djvu/17

 PREFACE

afternoon in June, 1876, three Princeton undergraduates were lying under the trees on the canal bank, making a languid pretence of preparing for an examination. Suddenly, one of the trio remarked: "I have been reading an old magazine article which describes a fossil-collecting expedition in the West; why can't we get up something of the kind?" The others replied, as with one voice, "We can ; let's do it." This seemingly idle talk was, for Osborn and myself, a momentous one, for it completely changed the careers which, as we then believed, had been mapped out for us. The random suggestion led directly to the first of the Princeton palæontological expeditions, that of 1877, which took us to the "Bad Lands" of the Bridger region in southwestern Wyoming. The fascination of discovering and exhuming with our own hands the remains of the curious creatures which once inhabited North America, but became extinct ages ago, has proved an enduring delight. It was the wish to extend something of this fascinating interest to a wider circle, that occasioned the preparation of this book.

The western portion of North America has preserved a marvellous series of records of the successive assemblages of animals which once dwelt in this continent, and in southernmost South America an almost equally complete record was made of the strange animals of that region. For the last half-century, or more, many workers have cooperated to bring this long-vanished world to light and to decipher and interpret the wonderful story of mammalian development in the western hemisphere. The task of making this history intelligible, not to say interesting, to the layman, has been one of formidable difficulty, for it is recorded in the successive modifications of the bones and teeth, and without some knowledge of osteology, these records are in an unknown ix