He naturally explored the same beds at Canyon City, immediately below the dinosaur deposits, and soon found the still very problematical _Hallopus_ skeleton, at their very top, a specimen which after nearly forty years remains unique of its kind.
A few years earlier Professor Marsh, on his way east from the Tertiary deposits of western Wyoming, had stopped at Como, Wyoming, to observe the strange salamanders, or "fish with legs" as they were widely known, so abundant in the lake at that place, about whose transformations he later wrote a paper, perhaps the only one on modern vertebrates that he ever published.

While he was there Mr.Carlin, the station agent, showed him some fossil bone fragments, so Mr.Reed told me, that they had picked up in the vicinity, and about which Professor Marsh made some comments.

But he was so engrossed with the other discoveries he was then making that he did not follow up the suggestion.

Had he done so the discovery of the "Jurassic Dinosaurs" would have been made five years earlier.
Mr.Reed, tramping over the famous Como hills after game--he had been a professional hunter of game for the construction camps of the Union Pacific Railroad--in the winter and spring of 1877, observed some fossil bones just south of the railway station that excited his curiosity.

But he and Mr.Carlin did not make their discovery known to Professor Marsh till the following autumn, and then under assumed names, fearing that they would be robbed of their discovery.