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Transcribed and submitted by Linda Talbott
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Formatted by USGenNet Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott
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The Salem Observer
Friday, April 12, 1867

              
                             A HUGE MONSTER
                             
              As is known to many of our readers, there is a
            very curious and immense bone in Fishing Creek,
            some four miles from Enfield, Halifax County, N.C.
              According to the testimony of the oldest inhabi-
            tants the water of the bold creek ran below the 
            bone forty or fifty years ago, when school boys
            and others used the bone as a crossing. If we are
            not mistaken, the bed of the stream has filled up
            gradually in the long course of years, until the
            bone now lies some foot or so below the surface 
            of the water. Until recently, only some fifty or
            sixty feet were exposed, the ends being buried in
            either bank. It was commonly regarded as an anti-
            deluvian deposit, and pronounced by some to be the
            vertibrae of a whale or some other cetaccan mon-
            ster. The late professor EMMONS visited it in one
            of his scientific excursins east, and we believe
            carried specimens of the fossilliferous remains
            to Raleigh. He thought it was not a tree, as some
            of the unscientific did, but a genuine osseous 
            deposit. To what class of extinct animals or marine
            monsters he allotted it, we are not certain enough
            to venture to state. We understood recently that a
            person from the North was engaged in excavating
            the bone, and had already exposed more than one
            hundred feet. If we are rightly informed, he has
            also discovered four legs, which of course will
            destroy the idea that it was a whale, and probably
            class it with those gigantic extinct saurians 
            which once dwelt upon the earth. The enterprising
            excavator is sawing up the bone into blocks, which
            are carefully numbered. We presume a drawing has
            also been made. It is destined to become famous
            among men of science, and will in all probability
            be the greatest curiousity yet exhumed. It may
            introduce the scientific to an entirely unknown
            and extinct species. We have written to the
            gentleman engaged in escavating it and hope soon
            to lay the particulars before the public.
                 - Warrenton Vindicator.
                 
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