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Show ' ' ' J V W These Fish Swam Over Wyoming Approximately 55,000,000 Years Ago. Prepared by National Geographic Society, Washington. D. C. WNU Service. MOST fishermen must . be thrilled by the pull of a live denizen of the deep. Some, however, enjoy fishing for fossil fish, millions of years old, using us-ing picks, shovels and chisels for "tackle." One feature of fossil fishing Is that the big ones can't get away, once they are "caught." This fact, and also the minor one that fossil-fishing fossil-fishing In this country must be carried car-ried on In the remote, not to say obscure ob-scure portions of the United States, will probably keep it from assuming assum-ing the place which It deserves as a major outdoor sport. The proper fossil-fishing trip leads you, for example, to Fossil, Wyoming, where you may be the only person getting off there that year! Now the Priscacara pealel (poor fish to you!) may look tame enough as you pass him by in a museum on your way to the stuffed owls; but that is because these ancient relics of prehistoric days have been carefully caught for you, imprisoned impris-oned in their stone frames, labeled, and hung where they can excite only the inflammable interest of the paleontologist. But truly fishing some time for those rovers which, only a few million mil-lion years ago, swam blithely through that Inland ocean where are now the Rocky mountains. One week-end fishing trip In Wyoming Wy-oming may ?M you a 6-foot palm leaf, three large pickerel, bass, or pike, a prodigious mosquito (just the way you'd like to see a mosquito mosqui-to transformed Into solid rock), sun-fish, sun-fish, herring, the thick-scaled gar pike. Then you never know when yon may come upon an ancient crocodile croco-dile 13 feet long. One was found near the fossil bed, where you must look if you expect your week's sport to be really exciting. Where Roads Meet. Fossil, Wyoming, is formed by the accidental meeting of two roads which slipped down from opposite sides of a mountain. There Is a pleasing legend that the population of Fossil is 50; but, counting the people you can see and the ones yon can Imagine, you cannot arrive ar-rive at a generous estimate of more than BO. They will have to stop the train especially for you. They don't like to do It and, as you look out over the wind-swept, cold purple dawn on the Rocky mountains at this particular par-ticular point, neither do you. But it's worth it! A few minutes after you have arrived ar-rived on a well-conducted fossil-fishing trip, the sun will break over the farthest ridge In a long crescent of fossil mountain which sleeps content con-tent in a past which even the most arduous fisherman will never know. Around you Is a shallow sweep of mountain red. gray-, green, blue, and purple colored with time and emhracing earth and sky and air. The sky is a curious translucent blue. You stand as if on the basin of some huge broken piece of pottery. pot-tery. All about you at the broken brim are fossil beds which yon may fish to heart's content and whose depths you may never plumb. Custodian of the fossil beds, amateur am-ateur sportsman extraordinary, Robert Rob-ert Lee Craig, wjyi take you flailing If you have an honest Interest. He has been fishing In these hills for 37 years, and he has no patience with people who will not climb with him the 275 feet from his camp to the fossil hill; who will not wait while he lays bare a stratum of fossil rock; who will not. with his own suppressed excitement, cleave those strata again and again, peeling, stripping the layers down as though they were ears of corn. Often the finest specimens of fossilized fish will be hidden Just beneath the gray-like gray-like surface and would pass notice no-tice of all except the most observing. ob-serving. Heat of Day Best Time. It is best to wait until the he.v of the day to raise a ledge, for then the bright rays of sun. striking each layer as it is peeled off with wed-e and hammer, often show ,,p th"p I faint tracing of a backbone the dim outline of a fin. When the outline Is revealed the fossil fisherman takes the sharp blade of a knife and gently scratches the protecting shale away to make sure of his specimen. Then he hews out a square of rock around the fish, and the specimen is ready for cleaning. The cleaning process is done with the fine blade of a knife, great skill being exercised to clear away all trace of rock in which the fish Is imbedded without destroying the delicate outline of the fish. Hills Slip and Slide. These fossil hills are contrary-jealous contrary-jealous as deep pools where bass lie hidden from the caster's fly. They slip and slide, they shift and fall, to confound the fisherman and make for him unceasing labor. You must wait and hope, you must listen to stories of other fish, cither days; you must eat your noonday sandwich sand-wich dry and brittle and filled with some dust of shale; you must know the sadness of cleaving a whole sheaf of rock at last good, firm fossil rock In which whole schools of prehistoric fishes should lie buried only to find It barren as a desert trail. No, these fish took one more dive before the cataclysm, They lie to windward or to leeward. And though you are some 25 or 30 feet below the top layer of protecting protect-ing shale, still you have not fished deep enough. Perhaps the best definition ot the fossil fish for the amateur stone fisherman Is the simple one given by the late Frederic A. Lucas, formerly for-merly a curator of the National museum, mu-seum, in his book, "Animals of the Past." "Fossils," be says, "are the remains re-mains or even the indications, of animals and plants that have, through natural agencies, been buried In the earth and preserved for long periods of time." These "indications," "in-dications," which may be footprints, foot-prints, trampled leaves, the almost formless jellyfish, the very ripple on the sands, have been, in many Instances, In-stances, preserved in stone, perfect per-fect patterns of the ephemeral life of millions of years ago. And how did fossil fish come to be Imprisoned -In their strangely lifelike stony form in the Rocky mountains of Wyoming? Your mind must go back to lost ages, when an ocean rolled over the wheat fields of Kansas, the prairies of Nebraska, Ne-braska, and the site of the Empire State building alike. These abundant abun-dant seas were ruled successively by various races of sea creatures. Strange Ocean Rulers. Among the strange ocean rulers were the armor-clad fish ; then,- in turn, the fierce, sharp-toothed sharks, the fish lizards, the mysterious mysteri-ous ichthyosaurus, the pleslosaurus, whose names are only a little lesa terrifying than the havoc they spread among the fish lizards crawling crawl-ing in the mud of ocean bed. The great marine reptiles called Mosa-saurus, Mosa-saurus, geologists believe, ruled the seas from New Zealand to North America at one time. The Rocky mountains so placid and gray now by daytime swarmed with heroic battle In the days when they were still ocean bed. Huge turtles, saber-toothed divers, the monstrous fish of legend, all fought for supremacy, and over the waters wa-ters flew the pterodactyls, dark menacing shadows, with their powerful pow-erful wingspread of 20 feet or more. While the rival fish species spawned, fought, and died, the surface sur-face of the North American continent conti-nent was gradually taking form The land which made up the ocean bed was rising with monumental slowness an Inch, perhaps an inch and a half, a century. At last the "ocean" on the North American continent was completely engulfed on the west and on the east by elevations of sen bottom, S6 that It connected with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as we now know them only at the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic circle. Continued elevations of the eastern and western west-ern edges contracted the area of this vast Inland ocean, and parts of the ancient sea bottom rose reached the surface, forming bars and vast fingers of ,. v?lft lie water area were contracted Into m"J t". t las,, the, "J a" contact with salt water. |