Diggers

Little bands of men roaming over the earth, poking in caves, pits, mounds, quarries, buttes for vestiges of the creatures that roamed the earth before them. Bigger bands of men examining maps, bringing steam shovels, excavating whole dead civilizations. Millions of dollars spent in digging every year. . . . Following are significant efforts and exhumations of recent weeks:

In Montana. Princeton paleontologists under the leadership of Dr. Glenn L. Jepsen. digging in a cretaceous formation near Red Lodge in southern Montana, found some old broken eggs. They thought the eggs might have been laid 50 million years ago by an awkward dinosaur. The fragments were black, rough, pitted. Near the locality, in the same geological formation, the scientists were surprised to unearth the tooth of a mammal. Mammals are seldom found in cretaceous formations. Other dinosaur eggs known today were found seven years ago by Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews in Mongolia. His eggs were estimated to be several million years older than Dr. Jepsen's. The only other eggs were unearthed years ago in England. British paleontologists did not recognize them at the time, threw them on a rubbish heap in the basement of the British museum. Several years ago they identified them, dusted them off, cherished them as one of their prize exhibits. Paleontologists from Princeton will return to Red Lodge next year, look for more eggs, more teeth.

In Arizona. Last year Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History (Manhattan) found the shattered fragments of a fossil reptile in Arizona. He carefully preserved each piece. But when he tried to put his little 3-ft. reptile together, he found many of the fragments missing. He recognized the fossil as the remains of an ancestor of the ancient dinosaur. This year he went to Arizona again, sifted 15 tons of dirt through fly screens. Fortnight ago he returned to Manhattan with a cigar box half-full of bits to complete his paleontologic jigsaw puzzle. The small reptile which crawled about the earth millions of years ago was not adequately equipped to cope with its environment, became extinct long before the great dinosaur appeared.

In Michigan. Professor Russell G. Hussey, geologist at the University of Michigan, dug up some whale bones in Michigan. The big animal had died sometime in the Pleistocene period, the great ice age of 550,000 years ago. The discovery interested Dr. Remington Kellogg, whale authority of the National Museum, Washington. Because early whale bones have been found up the St. Lawrence River near Lake Ontario, scientists have thought that the St. Lawrence region was once a part of the ocean. The new discovery extends this old-time ocean inlet even farther, taking in the entire Great Lakes region. Said Dr. Kellogg: "It's a cinch they [whales] didn't climb Niagara Falls."

In Spain. Jose Viloria, Madrid streetcar conductor, on a Sunday jaunt to suburban Moncloa, kicked about in a dirt pile on the site of a new university, found a bone, an old dirty pot. When he showed the pot and bone to university authorities, they enthusiastically called a meeting of the board of directors, engaged Professor Hugo Obermaier, archeologist of Central University, to dig more pots. On the streetcar conductor's Sunday picnic site were found coins, wooden kitchen utensils, old pottery, stone knives, a granite grinding mill, skeletons of bulls, goats, birds. Professor Obermaier reported the discoveries to be 4,500 yr. old.

Later when six tombs full of Roman bones and a crumbling Roman villa were uncovered in La Carolina, another Madrid suburb, El Debate, Independent daily, proposed that Madrid should declare itself "the capital of the prehistoric world."

In Russia. Archeologists have long known the ruins of New Chersonese, an old Greek settlement, near the modern Crimean city of Sevastopol. But they had never found the more ancient site of Old Chersonese which Strabo, famed Greek geographer, described. Two years ago Professor Markevitch, Crimean archeologist, told the Moscow Archeological Society to stop scratching in the earth, to look under the sea for Old Chersonese. Fishermen had told him of a wonderful submarine city off the coast of Sevastopol. Russian scientists set to work soon afterward with divers and giant searchlights, found Old Chersonese 210 ft. offshore. The city stretches extensively under water, is surrounded by a semicircular wall. Divers have walked about the large paved market place, now grown over with seaweed, have seen fish swim about in the crumbling houses. So far only southern and eastern portions have been charted. Scientists think that Old Chersonese is more than 2,000 years old, was sent to the sea bottom in the great earthquakes of 480 A.D. which lasted 40 days.

In Palestine. Everybody knows that Joshua and his army of invading Israelites marched round about the Canaanite city of Jericho, blew trumpets for seven days before they sacked the city. Recently British archeologists who have spent many months studying the ruins of the city which was destroyed almost 4,000 years ago, announced that they had discovered why Joshua made so much noise. A charred tree trunk plugged into a hole in the inner wall suggested that Israelite trumpeters blew blasts to hide the work of Israelite engineers who were picking holes in the fortifications. Every hole was plugged with a wooden beam or a dry tree trunk. On the seventh day, the wooden fillings were set on fire. Two walls surrounded the city. The outer, 8 ft. thick, rolled down the slope on which Jericho was built. Portions of the inner wall, 12 ft. thick, resisted the fire, still stand. Charred dwellings give evidence to substantiate the Biblical account that flames rolled over the city, burned the Canaanites to crisps.

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