1934 FOSSIL HUNTING magazine article, Fossil Wyoming, Paleontology

Description

Selling is a 1934 magazine article about:
FOSSIL HUNTING
Title: "COMPLEAT ANGLER" FISHES FOR FOSSILS
Author: Imogene Powell
Quoting the first page “There is one feature of fossil-fishing which sets it apart from all other angling sports-the big ones can't get away!
This fact, and also the minor one that fossil-fishing in this country must be carried on in the remote, not to say obscure, portions of the United States, will probably keep it from assuming the place which it deserves as a major American 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 pealei
(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 in their stone frames, labeled, and hung where they can excite only the inflammable interest of the paleontologist.
But try fishing some time for those rovers which, only a few million years ago, "when you were a tadpole and I was a fish," swam blithely through that inland ocean where are now the Rocky Mountains.
One week-end fishing trip in Wyoming may net you a six-foot palm leaf, three large pickerel, bass, or pike, a prodigious mosquito (just the way you'd like to see a mosquito, transformed into solid rock), sunfish, herring, the thick-scaled gar pike.
Then, you never know when you may come upon an ancient crocodile 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.
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 you can imagine, you cannot arrive at a generous estimate of more than 30. There are four regulation buildings, and there is a box-car fitted up with chintz curtains and bespangled with cooking pans. The foreman of a section gang lives there. A sheep herder's summer home, neat barrel staves covered with sheeting, stands at the corner of State and Madison.
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 point, neither do you. But it's worth it!
A few minutes after you have arrived 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 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 embracing 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. All about you at the broken brim are fossil beds which you may fish to heart's content and whose depth you may never plumb.
Custodian of the fossil beds, amateur sportsman extraordinary, Robert Lee Craig will take you fishing 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-white surface and would pass notice of all except the most observing.
It is best to wait until the heat of the day to raise a ledge, for then the bright rays of sun, striking each layer as it is peeled off  with wedge and hammer, often show up the faint tracing of a backbone, the dim outline of a fin.
When this 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…"
7” x 10”, 8 pages, 7 B&W photos
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1934 magazine.
34H6
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