Geary, E. - 1868

Fossils.-- Yesterday Mr. E. Geary of White Bluffs, which are about fifteen miles southeast of this city, sent us a couple of petrified bones of such a size as not now to be found in any animal living in the United States. These bones have been washed out of the bank at a locality near which there was formerly a lake which appears to have been filled up by deposits washed from the bluffs. One of the bones appears to have been crushed before petrification, by an immense weight as of a falling bank, or something of that description.

Mr. Geary contemplates “prospecting” for more of such fossils as soon as the frost leaves the ground and hopes to obtain a complete skeleton of the animal, whatever it may have been. We have called in the most learned and scientific savans [sic] of Cheyenne in order that we might have the benefits of geology and zoology in trying to determine to what species of animals the remains originally belonged, and we trust that our readers will appreciate the labors of the learned men who have enabled us to give the following opinion which is founded upon years of experience and study.

We at first suggest that it might have been a Mastodon, but the look from one of the savans [sic] apparent pity for our ignorance of antediluvial zoology, at once convinced us that it was by no means a Mastodon, so we determined to listen and learn the following about fossils which was delivered, as the result of the consultation of the philosophers: “The prodigous animal which lived and moved by the aid of these formerly anchylotic and at present fossilized portions of a skeleton, was evidently not megalosaurus in character, as that organization is impossible in animals, which belong to the long since extinct order known as the Megalonyx, to which this specimen might have been connected, as it was evidently Pachydematous in its construction, and beyond a doubt, Anthobian in its habits, as it is well known to science that the Anthropophagous could not possible have existed in the same era as the Saurold Ithosaurium and Anoplotherium, whose habits were similar to the Megalosaurus, neither of which were ossivrous.

We concur.
~ Cheyenne Daily Argus, 22-Feb-1868, Page 4, Column 2