Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/712

696 Working very carefully, he extracted two enormous pieces of bone thickly coated with iron oxide—the distal ends of the fibula and tibia of some very large animal. Examining his find on the way home, he noticed a clean fracture, as if a spur had been broken from the bottom of the tibia, indicating a novel form. He returned to the bluff and extracted the missing piece. This bone was examined by Marsh and Cope, and figured by Cope and described by him as Ornithotarsus immanis, or "immense bird-ankled beast." The face of this ankle joint was thirteen inches and three quarters in the longer diameter; and the bones indicated an animal with long hind feet, like those of a bird, and short fore feet, that could stand up and browse upon the high trees of the forests in which it lived. Cope estimated the length of its hind legs at twelve feet.

Mr. B. Waterhouse Hawkins, an English artist skilled in the restoration of fossil forms, had come to this country and made some restorations of ancient gigantic animals—the Hadrosaurus, for instance, at the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, and at Princeton College. As he had made restorations of extinct English reptiles for a public park in England, it was thought that a good educational effect would result if a series of restorations of the so much grander extinct reptiles of the Cretaceous period of New Jersey could be set up in Central Park, and this gentleman was accordingly engaged for the project. He had a studio in New York city, where Prof. Lockwood visited him at his work. The artist's plan was, first to reconstruct the entire skeleton from the fossil bones, then to habilitate it in flesh by molding the clay upon it, so that the animal really had a true skeleton inside. Mr. Hawkins had already set up a Hadrosaurus when Mr. Lockwood called, but the visitor noticed that there was a break in the fibula. In answer to an inquiry about this omission, he was told that the beast had a singular articulation of this joint for which the fossil bones gave no data, and the artist had been unable to invent it. Mr. Lockwood modestly said to the artist:

"Why, I can articulate that for you."

Mr. Hawkins was incredulous, and seems to have continued so even after Mr. Lockwood told him he had the articulation at his house. Returning home, Mr. Lockwood made drawings of the part, the receipt of which set the English artist "crazy," as he expressed himself in a letter asking the loan of the bones. With their aid the difficulty was solved. Mr. Lockwood was afterward asked to sell the bones, to be given to the British Museum, but he preferred to keep them for America.

This incident was followed by a very curious psychological experience. Mr. Lockwood received from Mr. Hawkins an original cartoon of the Cretaceous dinosaurs, accompanied by a letter