The osteology of Protostega

Abstract

includes a preliminary notice of the huge Niobrara Cretaceous turtle, Protostega gigas. The type specimen was collected by Cope himself on a bluff near Butte Creek in the vicinity of Fort Wallace. It was secured in a more or less fragmentary condition after the manner of the vertebrate collecting of the earlier days of western exploration, for, in the more extended description given in the Cretaceous Vertebrata of the West, Cope says this fossil is made up of more than eight hundred separate