CHAPTER XI.
COLLECTING DINOSAURS.
HOW AND WHERE THEY ARE FOUND.
The visitor who is introduced to the dinosaurs through the medium of books and pictures or of the skeletons exhibited in the great museums, finds it hard--well nigh impossible--to realize their existence.
However willing he may be to accept on faith the reconstructions of the skeletons, the restorations of the animals and their supposed environment, it yet remains to him somewhat of a fairy-tale, a fanciful imaginative world peopled with ogres and dragons and belonging to the unreal "once upon a time" which has no connection with the ever present workaday world in which we live.

Birds and squirrels, rabbits and foxes belong to this real world because he has seen them in his walks through the woods; even elephants and rhinoceroses, though his acquaintance be limited to menagerie specimens, seem fairly real--although one recalls the farmer's comment on first seeing a giraffe in the Zoological park: "There aint no sich animal." But dinosaurs--one easily realizes the state of mind that prompts the inquiry so often made by visitors to the Dinosaur Hall:--"they make these out of plaster, don't they ?" So far as is consistent with good taste, the aim of the American Museum has been to enable the visitor to see for himself how much of plaster reconstruction there is to each skeleton, and to explain in the labels what the basis was for the reconstructed parts.
_How They are Found._ But to the collector these extinct animals are real enough.

As he journeys over the western plains he sees the various living inhabitants thereof, birds and beasts, as well as men, pursuing their various modes of life; here and there he comes across the scattered skeletons or bones of modern animals lying strewn upon the surface of the ground or half buried in the soil of a cut bank.

In the shales or sandstones that underlie the soil he finds the objects of his search, skeletons or bones of extinct animals, similarly disposed, but buried in rock instead of soft soil, and exposed in canyons and gullies cut through the solid rock.

Each rock formation, he knows by precept and experience, carries its own peculiar fauna, its animals are different from those of the formation above and from those in the formation below.