Meet Professor Paleozoic

Our leader, Professor Paleozoic, ordinarily existed in a sort of transition state between the primary and tertiary formations. He could tell cheese from chalk under the microscope, and show that one was full of the fossil and the other of the living evidences of animal life. A worthy man, vastly more troubled with rocks on the brain than "rocks" in the pocket. Learning had once come near making him mad, but from this sad fate he was happily saved by a somewhat Pickwickian blunder. While in Kansas, some years since, he penetrated a remote portion of the wilderness, where, as he was happy in believing, none but the native savage, or, possibly, the primeval man, could ever have tarried long enough to leave any sign behind. Imagine his astonishment and delight, therefore, when from the tangled grass he drew an upright stone, with lines chiseled on three sides and on the fourth a rude figure resembling more than any thing else one of those odd fictions which geologists call restored specimens. On a ledge
near were huge depressions like foot-prints. They were foot-prints of birds, no doubt, and quite as perfect as those found in more favored localities, and from which whole skeletons had been constructed by learned men.

Both specimens were forwarded to, and at the expense of, noted savans of the East. Our professor called the pillar from the tangled grass an altar raised by early races to the winds. The short lines, he suggested, designated the different points of the compass, while the rude figure was intended for Boreas. Our scientists toward the rising sun met the boxes at the depot, paid charges, and careful draymen bore them to the expectant museum. One hour after, seven wise men might have been seen wending their way sorrowfully homeward, with hands crossed meditatively under their coat-tails, and pocket vacuums where lately were modern coins. Government clearly had a case against our professor. Science decided that he had removed a stone telling in surveyors' signs just what section and township it was on. The figure which he had imagined a heathen idea of Boreas was the fancy of some surveyor's idle moment -- a shocking sketch of an impossible buffalo. Whether the bird-tracks had a
common origin, or were hewn by the hatchets of the red man, is a point still under discussion. - From Buffalo Land (1874), by W.E. Webb