Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 75

In the mid-1930s, a high school student at Frederick, South Dakota, Don Neff, found some strange looking teeth on the banks of the Elm River. After doing some investigating, the inquisitive student found the remains of a giant 28-foot marine lizard buried in the shale and mud along the river.

When brought to his attention, Professor James Bump, director of the museum of the State School of Mines, in Rapid City, South Dakota, said that the remains had probably been there for “several million years.” Professor Bump had his degree in metallurgy, but as director of the museum, he was becoming increasingly interested in the discovery of such fossils as the high school boy had brought to him. Bump’s first estimate of “several million years” for the marine creature was later revised when the species was identified as a mosasaur, which had been supposedly extinct for 130 million years.

Prof. Bump’s excavation was considered a great archeological find, and in 1940 he and his associates made an important collection of Whitneyan fossils from south of the White River and east of Rockyford under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society.