After the plaster has hardened comes the difficult labor of digging the rock away from underneath. One has to lie on one’s left side and work with a light pick, using great care, so as to cut away the rock just enough to allow the frame to come down by its own weight. If force is used very likely the rock, with its enclosed fossil, will be torn from the frame, and the specimen ruined. Afterwards the rock is leveled off even with the frame, and the bottom nailed on. The case is then placed in a larger box with excelsior carefully packed around it.
The illustration (Fig. 18) shows a huge panel in process of being cut out. George and I spent two weeks of heavy labor upon another. Luckily, it was preserved in chalk hard enough to allow of its being lifted without breaking. The slab was about four inches thick, and weighed at least six hundred pounds, yet he and I handled it entirely alone, getting it boxed and into the wagon ourselves.
My old friend, Dr. S. W. Williston, who in the seventies was in charge of collecting parties for Professor Marsh, and is now a noted authority in paleontology and professor of that science in the University of Chicago, describes this specimen in his great work on North American plesiosaurs, a Field Columbian Museum publication. He says: “The specimen of _Dolichorhynchops osborni_, herewith described and illustrated [Fig. 20], was discovered by Mr. George Sternberg, in the summer of 1900, and skilfully collected by his father, the veteran collector of fossil vertebrates. The specimen was purchased of Mr. Sternberg in the following spring for the University of Kansas, where it has been mounted and now is. When received at the museum, the skeleton was almost wholly contained in a large slab of soft, yellow chalk, with all its bones disassociated, and more or less entangled together. The left ischium, lying by the side of the maxilla, was protruding from the surface, and part of it was lost. The bones of the tail and some of the smaller podial bones were removed a distance from the rest of the skeleton, and were collected separately by Mr. Sternberg. The head was lying partly upon its left side, and some of the bones of the right side had been macerated away. The maxilla indeed had disappeared.