Northern Wisconsin Advertiser

Skeletons of Prehistoric
Animals Is Chief Product
of Large Nebraska Ranch

Where do the museums of the coun-
try get their strange and curious
skeletons of prehistoric animals? If
the skeleton is a "dinohyus" or a mor-
opus," one may be quite sure that it
came from the farm of James Henry
Cook, in the northwest corner of Ne-
braska; and the chances are almost
equally good if the specimen happens
to be a saber-toothed cat or a many-
toed horse, or almost any of those
queer animals that belong to the early
Miocene period, writes R. P. Crawford
in Popular Mechanics Magazine. Most
ranchmen and farmers are quite con-
tent to raise the ordinary sort of stock,
but here is a ranch that is most widely
known because of its output of pre-
historic animals. For more than a
decade paleontologists from the great
universities and museums of this coun-
try have made regular trips to these
fossil quarries.
The Cook farm and ranch, located
close to the Wyoming line, comprises
some 15,000 acres.
On the eastern
edge of the ranch the Niobrara river
has laid bare two hills, from both of
which scores and scores of fossil skele-
tons have been quarried. In the sum-
mer it is no uncommon occurrence for
representatives of half a dozen eastern
institutions to pitch camp near these
hills and spend several months digging
out the fossil bones which, when
worked over in the museum, form the
queer-looking skeletons.