ANIMALS OF THE PAST

Phororhacos, a Patagonian Giant of the Miocene.


From a drawing by Charles R. Knight.

Science for Everybody

ANIMALS OF THE PAST

BY

FREDERIC A. LUCAS

Curator of the Division of Comparative Anatomy,

United States National Museum

FULLY ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

1901

Copyright, 1900, by S. S. McClure Co.

1901, by McClure, Phillips & Co.

Published November, 1901.

[v]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The original drawings, made especially for this book,
are by Charles R. Knight and James M. Gleeson,
under the direction of Mr. Knight. The fact that the
originals of these drawings have been presented to and
accepted by the United States National Museum is
evidence of their scientific value. Mr. Knight has
been commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution, the
United States National Museum, and the New York
Museum of Natural History, to do their most important
pictures of extinct animals. He is the one
modern artist who can picture prehistoric animals
with artistic charm of presentation as well as with full
scientific accuracy. In this instance, the author has
personally superintended the artist's work, so that it is
as correct in every respect as present knowledge makes
possible. Of the minor illustrations, some are by Mr.
Bruce Horsfall, an artist attached to the staff of the
New York Museum of Natural History, and all have
been drawn with the help of and under the author's
supervision.

[xi]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[xv]

INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY

At the present time the interest in the ancient
life of this earth is greater than ever before, and
very considerable sums of money are being expended
to dispatch carefully planned expeditions
to various parts of the world systematically to
gather the fossil remains of the animals of the
past. That this interest is not merely confined
to a few scientific men, but is shared by the general
public, is shown by the numerous articles,
including many telegrams, in the columns of the
daily papers. The object of this book is to tell
some of the interesting facts concerning a few of
the better known or more remarkable of these
extinct inhabitants of the ancient world; also,
if possible, to ease the strain on these venerable
animals, caused by stretching them so often beyond
their due proportions.

The book is admittedly somewhat on the lines[xvi]
of Mr. Hutchinson's "Extinct Monsters" and
"Creatures of Other Days," but it is hoped that
it may be considered with books as with boats,
a good plan to build after a good model. The
information scattered through these pages has
been derived from varied sources; some has of
necessity been taken from standard books, a
part has been gathered in the course of museum
work and official correspondence; for much, the
author is indebted to his personal friends, and
for a part, he is under obligations to friends he
has never met, who have kindly responded to his
inquiries. The endeavor has been conscientiously
made to exclude all misinformation; it is, nevertheless,
entirely probable that some mistakes may
have crept in, and due apology for these is hereby
made beforehand.

The author expects to be taken to task for
the use of scientific names, and the reader may
perhaps sympathize with the old lady who said
that the discovery of all these strange animals
did not surprise her so much as the fact that
anyone should know their names when they were
found. The real trouble is that there are no
common names for these animals. Then, too,[xvii]
people who call for easier names do not stop to
reflect that, in many cases, the scientific names are
no harder than others, simply less familiar, and,
when domesticated, they cease to be hard: witness
mammoth, elephant, rhinoceros, giraffe, boa constrictor,
all of which are scientific names. And
if, for example, we were to call the Hyracotherium
a Hyrax beast it would not be a name,
but a description, and not a bit more intelligible.

Again, it is impossible to indicate the period
at which these creatures lived without using the
scientific term for it—Jurassic, Eocene, Pliocene,
as the case may be—because there is no
other way of doing it.

Some readers will doubtless feel disappointed
because they are not told how many years ago
these animals lived. The question is often asked—How
long ago did this or that animal live? But
when the least estimate puts the age of the earth
at only 10,000,000 years, while the longest makes
it 6,000,000,000, it does seem as if it were hardly
worth while to name any figures. Even when
we get well toward the present period we find
the time that has elapsed since the beginning of[xviii]
the Jurassic, when the Dinosaurs held carnival,
variously put at from 15,000,000 to 6,000,000
years; while from the beginning of the Eocene,
when the mammals began to gain the supremacy,
until now, the figures vary from 3,000,000
to 5,000,000 years. So the question of age will
be left for the reader to settle to his or her satisfaction.

The restorations of extinct animals may be
considered as giving as accurate representations
of these creatures as it is possible to make; they
were either drawn by Mr. Knight, whose name
is guarantee that they are of the highest quality,
or by Mr. Gleeson, with the aid of Mr. Knight's
criticism. That they are infallibly correct is out
of the question; for, as Dr. Woodward writes
in the preface to "Extinct Monsters," "restorations
are ever liable to emendation, and the present
... will certainly prove no exception
to the rule." As a striking instance of this, it
was found necessary at the last moment to
change the figure of Hesperornis, the original
life-like portrait proving to be incorrect in
attitude, a fact that would have long escaped
detection but for the Pan-American Exposition.[xix]
The connection between the two is explained on
page 76. However, the reader may rest assured
that these restorations are infinitely more
nearly correct than many figures of living
animals that have appeared within the last
twenty-five years, and are even now doing
duty.

The endeavor has been made to indicate, at the
end of each chapter, the museums in which the
best examples of the animals described may be
seen, and also some book or article in which further
information may be obtained. As this book
is intended for the general reader, references to
purely technical articles have, so far as possible,
been avoided, and none in foreign languages
mentioned.

For important works of reference on the
subject of paleontology, the reader may consult
"A Manual of Paleontology," by Alleyne Nicholson
and R. Lydekker, a work in two volumes
dealing with invertebrates, vertebrates, and
plants, or "A Text-Book of Paleontology," by
Karl von Zittel, English edition, only the first
volume of which has so far been published. An
admirable book on the vertebrates is "Outlines[xx]
of Vertebrate Paleontology," by Arthur Smith
Woodward. It is to be understood that these
are not at all "popular" in their scope, but
intended for students who are already well
advanced in the study of zoölogy.

ANIMALS OF THE PAST

[1]

I

FOSSILS, AND HOW THEY ARE FORMED

Fossils are the remains, or even the indications,
of animals and plants that have, through
natural agencies, been buried in the earth and
preserved for long periods of time. This may
seem a rather meagre definition, but it is a difficult
matter to frame one that will be at once
brief, exact, and comprehensive; fossils are not
necessarily the remains of extinct animals or
plants, neither are they, of necessity, objects
that have become petrified or turned into stone.

Bones of the Great Auk and Rytina, which
are quite extinct, would hardly be considered
as fossils; while the bones of many species of
animals, still living, would properly come in
that category, having long ago been buried by
natural causes and often been changed into[2]
stone. And yet it is not essential for a specimen
to have had its animal matter replaced by
some mineral in order that it may be classed as
a fossil, for the Siberian Mammoths, found entombed
in ice, are very properly spoken of as
fossils, although the flesh of at least one of these
animals was so fresh that it was eaten. Likewise
the mammoth tusks brought to market
are termed fossil-ivory, although differing but
little from the tusks of modern elephants.

Many fossils indeed merit their popular appellation
of petrifactions, because they have
been changed into stone by the slow removal
of the animal or vegetable matter present and
its replacement by some mineral, usually silica
or some form of lime. But it is necessary to
include 'indications of plants or animals' in
the above definition because some of the best
fossils may be merely impressions of plants or
animals and no portion of the objects themselves,
and yet, as we shall see, some of our
most important information has been gathered
from these same imprints.

Nearly all our knowledge of the plants that
flourished in the past is based on the impressions[3]
of their leaves left on the soft mud or
smooth sand that later on hardened into enduring
stone. Such, too, are the trails of creeping
and crawling things, casts of the burrows of
worms and the many footprints of the reptiles,
great and small, that crept along the shore or
stalked beside the waters of the ancient seas.
The creatures themselves have passed away,
their massive bones even are lost, but the prints
of their feet are as plain to-day as when they
were first made.

Many a crustacean, too, is known solely or
mostly by the cast of its shell, the hard parts
having completely vanished, and the existence
of birds in some formations is revealed merely
by the casts of their eggs; and these natural
casts must be included in the category of
fossils.

Impressions of vertebrates may, indeed, be
almost as good as actual skeletons, as in the
case of some fishes, where the fine mud in
which they were buried has become changed
to a rock, rivalling porcelain in texture; the
bones have either dissolved away or shattered
into dust at the splitting of the rock, but the[4]
imprint of each little fin-ray and every threadlike
bone is as clearly defined as it would have
been in a freshly prepared skeleton. So fine,
indeed, may have been the mud, and so quiet
for the time being the waters of the ancient
sea or lake, that not only have prints of bones
and leaves been found, but those of feathers
and of the skin of some reptiles, and even of
such soft and delicate objects as jelly fishes.
But for these we should have little positive
knowledge of the outward appearance of the
creatures of the past, and to them we are occasionally
indebted for the solution of some
moot point in their anatomy.

The reader may possibly wonder why it is
that fossils are not more abundant; why, of the
vast majority of animals that have dwelt upon
the earth since it became fit for the habitation
of living beings, not a trace remains. This,
too, when some objects—the tusks of the Mammoth,
for example—have been sufficiently well
preserved to form staple articles of commerce
at the present time, so that the carved handle
of my lady's parasol may have formed part of
some animal that flourished at the very dawn
[5]
of the human race, and been gazed upon by
her grandfather a thousand times removed.
The answer to this query is that, unless the conditions
were such as to preserve at least the
hard parts of any creature from immediate decay,
there was small probability of its becoming
fossilized. These conditions are that the
objects must be protected from the air, and,
practically, the only way that this happens in
nature is by having them covered with water,
or at least buried in wet ground.

Fig. 1.—Diplomystus, an Ancient Member of the Shad Family. From the Fishbed
at Green River, Wyoming.


From a specimen in the United States National Museum.

If an animal dies on dry land, where its bones
lie exposed to the summer's sun and rain and
the winter's frost and snow, it does not take
these destructive agencies long to reduce the
bones to powder; in the rare event of a climate
devoid of rain, mere changes of temperature,
by producing expansion and contraction,
will sooner or later cause a bone to crack and
crumble.

Usually, too, the work of the elements is
aided by that of animals and plants. Every
one has seen a dog make way with a pretty
good-sized bone, and the Hyena has still greater
capabilities in that line; and ever since vertebrate
[6]
life began there have been carnivorous
animals of some kind to play the rôle of bone-destroyers.
Even were there no carnivores,
there were probably then, as now, rats and
mice a-plenty, and few suspect the havoc small
rodents may play with a bone for the grease it
contains, or merely for the sake of exercising
their teeth. Now and then we come upon a
fossil bone, long since turned into stone, on
which are the marks of the little cutting teeth
of field mice, put there long, long ago, and yet
looking as fresh as if made only last week.
These little beasts, however, are indirect rather
than direct agents in the destruction of bones
by gnawing off the outer layers, and thus permitting
the more ready entrance of air and
water. Plants, as a rule, begin their work after
an object has become partly or entirely buried
in the soil, when the tiny rootlets find their
way into fissures, and, expanding as they grow,
act like so many little wedges to force it
asunder.

Thus on dry land there is small opportunity
for a bone to become a fossil; but, if a creature
so perishes that its body is swept into the[7]
ocean or one of its estuaries, settles to the
muddy bottom of a lake or is caught on the
sandy shoals of some river, the chances are
good that its bones will be preserved. They
are poorest in the ocean, for unless the body
drifts far out and settles down in quiet waters,
the waves pound the bones to pieces with stones
or scour them away with sand, while marine
worms may pierce them with burrows, or
echinoderms cut holes for their habitations;
there are more enemies to a bone than one
might imagine.

Suppose, however, that some animal has
sunk in the depths of a quiet lake, where the
wash of the waves upon the shore wears the
sand or rock into mud so fine that it floats out
into still water and settles there as gently as
dew upon the grass. Little by little the bones
are covered by a deposit that fills every groove
and pore, preserving the mark of every ridge
and furrow; and while this may take long, it
is merely a matter of time and favorable circumstance
to bury the bones as deeply as one
might wish. Scarce a reader of these lines but
at some time has cast anchor in some quiet[8]
pond and pulled it up, thickly covered with
sticky mud, whose existence would hardly be
suspected from the sparkling waters and pebbly
shores. If, instead of a lake, our animal had
gone to the bottom of some estuary into which
poured a river turbid with mud, the process of
entombment would have been still more rapid,
while, had the creature been engulfed in quicksand,
it would have been the quickest method
of all; and just such accidents did take place
in the early days of the earth as well as now.
At least two examples of the great Dinosaur
Thespesius have been found with the bones all
in place, the thigh bones still in their sockets
and the ossified tendons running along the
backbone as they did in life. This would
hardly have happened had not the body been
surrounded and supported so that every part
was held in place and not crushed, and it is
difficult to see any better agency for this than
burial in quicksand.

If such an event as we have been supposing
took place in a part of the globe where the
land was gradually sinking—and the crust of
the earth is ever rising and falling—the mud[9]
and sand would keep on accumulating until
an enormously thick layer was formed. The
lime or silica contained in the water would
tend to cement the particles of mud and grains
of sand into a solid mass, while the process
would be aided by the pressure of the overlying
sediment, the heat created by this pressure,
and that derived from the earth beneath.
During this process the animal matter of bones
or other objects would disappear and its place
be taken by lime or silica, and thus would be
formed a layer of rock containing fossils. The
exact manner in which this replacement is
effected and in which the chemical and mechanical
changes occur is very far from being
definitely known—especially as the process of
"fossilization" must at times have been very
complicated.

In the case of fossil wood greater changes
have taken place than in the fossilization of
bone, for there is not merely an infiltration
of the specimen but a complete replacement of
the original vegetable by mineral matter, the
interior of the cells being first filled with silica
and their walls replaced later on. So completely[10]
and minutely may this change occur
that under the microscope the very cellular
structure of the wood is visible, and as this
varies according to the species, it is possible,
by microscopical examination, to determine
the relationship of trees in cases where nothing
but fragments of the trunk remain.

The process of fossilization is at best a slow
one, and soft substances such as flesh, or even
horn, decay too rapidly for it to take place, so
that all accounts of petrified bodies, human or
otherwise, are either based on deliberate frauds
or are the result of a very erroneous misinterpretation
of facts. That the impression or
cast of a body might be formed in nature,
somewhat as casts have been made of those
who perished at Pompeii, is true; but, so far, no
authentic case of the kind has come to light,
and the reader is quite justified in disbelieving
any report of "a petrified man."

Natural casts of such hard bodies as shells
are common, formed by the dissolving away of
the original shell after it had become enclosed
in mud, or even after this had changed to
stone, and the filling up of this space by the
[11]filtering in of water charged with lime or silica,
which is there deposited, often in crystalline
form. In this way, too, are formed casts
of eggs of reptiles and birds, so perfect that it
is possible to form a pretty accurate opinion
as to the group to which they belong.

Fig. 2.—Bryozoa from the Shore of the Devonian Sea that Covered Eastern
New York.


From a specimen in Yale University Museum, prepared by Dr. Beecher.

Sometimes it happens that shells or other
small objects imbedded in limestone have been
dissolved and replaced by silica, and in such
cases it is possible to eat away the enveloping
rock with acid and leave the silicified casts.
By this method specimens of shells, corals,
and bryozoans are obtained of almost lace-like
delicacy, and as perfect as if only yesterday
gathered at the sea-shore. Casts of the interior
of shells, showing many details of structure,
are common, and anyone who has seen clams
dug will understand how they are formed
by the entrance of mud into the empty shell.

Casts of the kernels of nuts are formed in
much the same way, and Professor E. H. Barbour
has thus described the probable manner
in which this was done. When the nuts were
dropped into the water of the ancient lake the
kernel rotted away, but the shell, being tough[12]
and hard, would probably last for years under
favorable circumstances. Throughout the
marls and clays of the Bad Lands (of South
Dakota) there is a large amount of potash.
This is dissolved by water, and then acts upon
quartz, carrying it away in solution. This
would find its way by infiltration into the interior
of the nut. At the same time with this
process, carrying lime carbonate in solution
was going on, so that doubtless the stone kernels,
consisting of pretty nearly equal parts of
lime and silica, were deposited within the nuts.
These kernels, of course, became hard and
flinty in time, and capable of resisting almost
any amount of weathering. Not so the organic
shell; this eventually would decay away,
and so leave the filling or kernel of chalcedony
and lime.[1]

"Fossil leaves" are nothing but fine casts,
made in natural moulds, and all have seen
the first stages in their formation as they
[13]watched the leaves sailing to the ground to be
covered by mud or sand at the next rain, or
dropping into the water, where sooner or later
they sink, as we may see them at the bottom
of any quiet woodland spring.

Impressions of leaves are among the early
examples of color-printing, for they are frequently
of a darker, or even different, tint from
that of the surrounding rock, this being caused
by the carbonization of vegetable matter or to
its action on iron that may have been present
in the soil or water. Besides complete mineralization,
or petrifaction, there are numerous
cases of incomplete or semi-fossilization, where
modern objects, still retaining their phosphate
of lime and some animal matter even, are
found buried in rock. This takes place when
water containing carbonate of lime, silica, or
sometimes iron, flows over beds of sand, cementing
the grains into solid but not dense
rock, and at the same time penetrating and
uniting with it such things as chance to be buried.
In this way was formed the "fossil man"
of Guadeloupe, West Indies, a skeleton of a
modern Carib lying in recent concretionary[14]
limestone, together with shells of existing species
and fragments of pottery. In a similar way,
too, human remains in parts of Florida have,
through the infiltration of water charged with
iron, become partially converted into limonite
iron ore; and yet we know that these bones
have been buried within quite recent times.

Sometimes we hear of springs or waters that
"turn things into stone," but these tales are
quite incorrect. Waters there are, like the
celebrated hot springs of Auvergne, France,
containing so much carbonate of lime in solution
that it is readily deposited on objects
placed therein, coating them more or less
thickly, according to the length of time they
are allowed to remain. This, however, is merely
an encrustation, not extending into the objects.
In a similar way the precipitation of
solid material from waters of this description
forms the porous rock known as tufa, and this
often encloses moss, twigs, and other substances
that are in no way to be classed with fossils.

But some streams, flowing over limestone
rocks, take up considerable carbonate of lime,
and this may be deposited in water-soaked logs,[15]
replacing more or less of the woody tissue and
thus really partially changing the wood into
stone.

The very rocks themselves may consist largely
of fossils; chalk, for example, is mainly made
up of the disintegrated shells of simple marine
animals called foraminifers, and the beautiful
flint-like "skeletons" of other small creatures
termed radiolarians, minute as they are, have
contributed extensively to the formation of
some strata.

Even after an object has become fossilized,
it is far from certain that it will remain in good
condition until found, while the chance of its
being found at all is exceedingly small. When
we remember that it is only here and there
that nature has made the contents of the rocks
accessible by turning the strata on edge, heaving
them into cliffs or furrowing them with
valleys and canyons, we realize what a vast
number of pages of the fossil record must
remain not only unread, but unseen. The
wonder is, not that we know so little of
the history of the past, but that we have
learned so much, for not only is nature careless[16]
in keeping the records—preserving them
mostly in scattered fragments—but after they
have been laid away and sealed up in the rocks
they are subject to many accidents. Some
specimens get badly flattened by the weight
of subsequently deposited strata, others are
cracked and twisted by the movements of the
rocks during periods of upheaval or subsidence,
and when at last they are brought to the surface,
the same sun and rain, snow and frost,
from which they once escaped, are ready to
renew the attack and crumble even the hard
stone to fragments. Such, very briefly, are
some of the methods by which fossils may be
formed, such are some of the accidents by
which they may be destroyed; but this description
must be taken as a mere outline and as
applying mainly to vertebrates, or backboned
animals, since it is with them that we shall have
to deal. It may, however, show why it is that
fossils are not more plentiful, why we have
mere hints of the existence of many animals,
and why myriads of creatures may have flourished
and passed away without so much as
leaving a trace of their presence behind.

[17]

REFERENCES

A very valuable and interesting article by Dr. Charles
A. White, entitled "The Relation of Biology to Geological
Investigation," will be found in the Report of the
United States National Museum for 1892. This comprises
a series of essays on the nature and scientific uses
of fossil remains, their origin, relative chronological
value and other questions pertaining to them. The United
States National Museum has published a pamphlet, part
K, Bulletin 39, containing directions for collecting and
preparing fossils, by Charles Schuchert; and another,
part B, Bulletin 39, collecting recent and fossil plants,
by F. H. Knowlton.

Fig. 3.—Skeleton of a Radiolarian Very Greatly Enlarged.

[18]

II

THE EARLIEST KNOWN VERTEBRATES

There is a universal, and perfectly natural, desire
for information, which in ourselves we term
thirst for knowledge and in others call curiosity,
that makes mankind desire to know how everything
began and causes much speculation as to
how it all will end. This may take the form
of a wish to know how a millionaire made his
first ten cents, or it may lead to the questions—What
is the oldest animal? or, What is the
first known member of the great group of backboned
animals at whose head man has placed
himself? and, What did this, our primeval and
many-times-removed ancestor, look like? The
question is one that has ever been full of interest
for naturalists, and Nature has been interrogated
in various ways in the hope that she[19]
might be persuaded to yield a satisfactory answer.
The most direct way has been that of
tracing back the history of animal life by means
of fossil remains, but beyond a certain point
this method cannot go, since, for reasons stated
in various places in these pages, the soft
bodies of primitive animals are not preserved.
To supplement this work, the embryologist has
studied the early stages of animals, as their development
throws a side-light on their past
history. And, finally, there is the study of the
varied forms of invertebrates, some of which
have proved to be like vertebrates in part of
their structure, while others have been revealed
as vertebrates in disguise. So far these various
methods have yielded various answers, or the
replies, like those of the Delphic Oracle, have
been variously interpreted so that vertebrates
are considered by some to have descended from
the worms, while others have found their beginnings
in some animal allied to the King Crab.

Every student of genealogy knows only too
well how difficult a matter it is to trace a family
pedigree back a few centuries, how soon the
family names become changed, the line of descent[20]
obscure, and how soon gaps appear whose
filling in requires much patient research. How
much more difficult must it be, then, to trace
the pedigree of a race that extends, not over
centuries, but thousands of centuries; how wide
must be some of the gaps, how very different
may the founders of the family be from their
descendants! The words old and ancient that
we use so often in speaking of fossils appeal to
us somewhat vaguely, for we speak of the ancient
civilizations of Greece and Rome, and call
a family old that can show a pedigree running
back four or five hundred years, when such as
these are but affairs of yesterday compared
with even recent fossils.

Perhaps we may better appreciate the meaning
of these words by recalling that, since the
dawn of vertebrate life, sufficient of the earth's
surface has been worn away and washed into
the sea to form, were the strata piled directly
one upon the other, fifteen or twenty miles of
rock. This, of course, is the sum total of sedimentary
rocks, for such a thickness as this is not
to be found at any one locality; because, during
the various ups and downs that this world of[21]
ours has met with, those portions that chanced
to be out of water would receive no deposit of
mud or sand, and hence bear no corresponding
stratum of rock. The reader may think that
there is a great deal of difference between fifteen
and twenty miles, but this liberal margin
is due to the difficulty of measuring the thickness
of the rocks, and in Europe the sum of
the measurable strata is much greater than in
North America.

The earliest traces of animal life are found
deeper still, beneath something like eighteen
to twenty-five miles of rock, while below this
level are the strata in which dwelt the earliest
living things, organisms so small and simple
that no trace of their existence has been left,
and we infer that they were there because any
given group starts in a modest way with small
and simple individuals.

At the bottom, then, of twenty miles of rocks
the seeker for the progenitor of the great family
of backboned animals finds the scant remains
of fish-like animals that the cautious
naturalist, who is much given to "hedging,"
terms, not vertebrates, but prevertebrates or[22]
the forerunners of backboned animals. The
earliest of these consist of small bony plates,
and traces of a cartilaginous backbone from
the Lower Silurian of Colorado, believed to
represent relatives of Chimæra and species related
to those better-known forms Holoptychius
and Osteolepis, which occur in higher
strata. There are certainly indications of vertebrate
life, but the remains are so imperfect
that little more can be said regarding them,
and this is also true of the small conical teeth
which occur in the Lower Silurian of St. Petersburg,
and are thought to be the teeth of
some animal like the lamprey.

A little higher up in the rocks, though not
in the scale of life, in the Lower Old Red Sandstone
of England, are found more numerous
and better preserved specimens of another little
fish-like creature, rarely if ever exceeding
two inches in length, and also related (probably)
to the hag-fishes and lampreys that live
to-day.

These early vertebrates are not only small,
but they were cartilaginous, so that it was essential
for their preservation that they should[23]
be buried in soft mud as soon as possible after
death. Even if this took place they were later
on submitted to the pressure of some miles of
overlying rock until, in some cases, their remains
have been pressed out thinner than a
sheet of paper, and so thoroughly incorporated
into the surrounding stone that it is no easy
matter to trace their shadowy outlines. With
such drawbacks as these to contend with, it can
scarcely be wondered at that, while some naturalists
believe these little creatures to be related
to the lamprey, others consider that they belong
to a perfectly distinct group of animals, and
others still think it possible that they may be
the larval or early stages of larger and better-developed
forms.

Still higher up we come upon the abundant
remains of numerous small fish-like animals,
more or less completely clad in bony armor,
indicating that they lived in troublous times
when there was literally a fight for existence
and only such as were well armed or well
protected could hope to survive. A parallel
case exists to-day in some of the rivers of South
America, where the little cat-fishes would pos[24]sibly
be eaten out of existence but for the fact
that they are covered—some of them very
completely—with plate-armor that enables
them to defy their enemies, or renders them
such poor eating as not to be worth the taking.
The arrangement of the plates or scales in the
living Loricaria is very suggestive of the series
of bony rings covering the body of the ancient
Cephalaspis, only the latter, so far as we know,
had no side-fins; but the creatures are in no[25]
wise related, and the similarity is in appearance
only.

Fig. 4.—Cephalaspis and Loricaria, an Ancient and a
Modern Armored Fish.

Pterichthys, the wing fish, was another small,
quaint, armor-clad creature, whose fossilized remains
were taken for those of a crab, and once
described as belonging to a beetle. Certainly
the buckler of this fish, which is the part most
often preserved, with its jointed, bony arms,
looks to the untrained eye far more like some
strange crustacean than a fish, and even naturalists
have pictured the animal as crawling
over the bare sands by means of those same
arms. These fishes and their allies were once
the dominant type of life, and must have
abounded in favored localities, for in places are
great deposits of their protective shields jumbled
together in a confused mass, and, save
that they have hardened into stone, lying just
as they were washed up on the ancient beach
ages ago. How abundant they were may be
gathered from the fact that it is believed their
bodies helped consolidate portions of the strata
of the English Old Red Sandstone. Says Mr.
Hutchinson, speaking of the Caithness Flagstones,
"They owe their peculiar tenacity and[26]
durability to the dead fishes that rotted in their
midst while yet they were only soft mud.
For just as a plaster cast boiled in oil becomes
thereby denser and more durable, so the oily
and other matter coming from decomposing
fish operated on the surrounding sand or mud
so as to make it more compact."

It may not be easy to explain how it came
to pass that fishes dwelling in salt water, as
these undoubtedly did, were thus deposited in
great numbers, but we may now and then see
how deposits of fresh-water fishes may have
been formed. When rivers flowing through a
stretch of level country are swollen during the
spring floods, they overflow their banks, often
carrying along large numbers of fishes. As the
water subsides these may be caught in shallow
pools that soon dry up, leaving the fishes to
perish, and every year the Illinois game association
rescues from the "back waters" quantities
of bass that would otherwise be lost.
Mr. F. S. Webster has recorded an instance
that came under his observation in Texas,
where thousands of gar pikes, trapped in a lake
formed by an overflow of the Rio Grande, had[27]
been, by the drying up of this lake, penned into
a pool about seventy-five feet long by twenty-five
feet wide. The fish were literally packed
together like sardines, layer upon layer, and a
shot fired into the pool would set the entire
mass in motion, the larger gars as they dashed
about casting the smaller fry into the air, a
score at a time. Mr. Webster estimates that
there must have been not less than 700 or 800
fish in the pool, from a foot and a half up to
seven feet in length, every one of which perished
a little later. In addition to the fish in
the pond, hundreds of those that had died previously
lay about in every direction, and one
can readily imagine what a fish-bed this would
have made had the occurrence taken place in
the past.

From the better-preserved specimens that do
now and then turn up, we are able to obtain a
very exact idea of the construction of the bony
cuirass by which Pterichthys and its American
cousin were protected, and to make a pretty
accurate reconstruction of the entire animal.
These primitive fishes had mouths, for eating is
a necessity; but these mouths were not associated[28]
with true jaws, for the two do not, as might
be supposed, necessarily go together. Neither
did these animals possess hard backbones, and,
while Pterichthys and its relatives had arms or
fins, the hard parts of these were not on the
inside but on the outside, so that the limb was
more like the leg of a crab than the fin of a
fish; and this is among the reasons why some
naturalists have been led to conclude that vertebrates
may have developed from crustaceans.
Pteraspis, another of these little armored prevertebrates,
had a less complicated covering,
and looked very much like a small fish with its
fore parts caught in an elongate clam-shell.

The fishes that we have so far been considering—orphans
of the past they might be termed,
as they have no living relatives—were little fellows;
but their immediate successors, preserved
in the Devonian strata, particularly of North
America, were the giants of those days, termed,
from their size and presumably fierce appearance,
Titantichthys and Dinichthys, and are related
to a fish, Ceratodus, still living in Australia.

We know practically nothing of the external
appearance of these fishes, great and fierce[29]
though they may have been, with powerful
jaws and armored heads, for they had no bony
skeleton—as if they devoted their energies to
preying upon their neighbors rather than to internal
improvements. They attained a length
of ten to eighteen feet, with a gape, in the large
species called Titanichthys, of four feet, and
such a fish might well be capable of devouring
anything known to have lived at that early
date.

Succeeding these, in Carboniferous times,
came a host of shark-like creatures known
mainly from their teeth and spines, for their
skeletons were of cartilage, and belonging to
types that have mostly perished, giving place
to others better adapted to the changed conditions
wrought by time. Almost the only living
relative of these early fishes is a little shark,
known as the Port Jackson Shark, living in
Australian waters. Like the old sharks, this
one has a spine in front of his back fins, and, like
them, he fortunately has a mouthful of diversely
shaped teeth; fortunately, because through their
aid we are enabled to form some idea of the
manner in which some of the teeth found scattered[30]
through the rocks were arranged. For
the teeth were not planted in sockets, as they
are in higher animals, but simply rested on the
jaws, from which they readily became detached
when decomposition set in after death. To
complicate matters, the teeth in different parts
of the jaws were often so unlike one another
that when found separately they would hardly
be suspected of having belonged to the same
animal. Besides teeth these fishes, for purposes
of offence and defence, were usually armed
with spines, sometimes of considerable size and
strength, and often elaborately grooved and
sculptured. As the soft parts perished the
teeth and spines were left to be scattered by
waves and currents, a tooth here, another there,
and a spine somewhere else; so it has often
happened that, being found separately, two or
three quite different names have been given to
one and the same animal. Now and then some
specimen comes to light that escaped the
thousand and one accidents to which such
things were exposed, and that not only shows
the teeth and spines but the faint imprint of
the body and fins as well. And from such rare[31]
examples we learn just what teeth and spines
go with one another, and sometimes find that
one fish has received names enough for an entire
school.

These ancient sharks were not the large and
powerful fishes that we have to-day—these
came upon the scene later—but mostly fishes
of small size, and, as indicated by their spines,
fitted quite as much for defence as offence.
Their rise was rapid, and in their turn they
became the masters of the world, spreading
in great numbers through the waters that covered
the face of the earth; but their supremacy
was of short duration, for they declined in
numbers even during the Carboniferous Period,
and later dwindled almost to extinction. And
while sharks again increased, they never reached
their former abundance, and the species that
arose were swift, predatory forms, better fitted
for the struggle for existence.

[32]

REFERENCES

The early fishes make but little show in a museum,
both on account of their small size and the conditions
under which they have been preserved. The Museum of
Comparative Zoölogy has a large collection of these
ancient vertebrates, and there is a considerable number of
fine teeth and spines of Carboniferous sharks in the
United States National Museum.

Hugh Miller's "The Old Red Sandstone" contains
some charming descriptions of his discoveries of Pterichthys
and related forms, and this book will ever remain a
classic.

Fig. 5.—Pterichthys, the Wing Fish.

[33]

III

IMPRESSIONS OF THE PAST

The Rev. H. N. Hutchinson commences one
of his interesting books with Emerson's saying,
"that Everything in nature is engaged in
writing its own history;" and, as this remark
cannot be improved on, it may well stand at
the head of a chapter dealing with the footprints
that the creatures of yore left on the
sands of the sea-shore, the mud of a long-vanished
lake bottom, or the shrunken bed of some
water-course. Not only have creatures that
walked left a record of their progress, but the
worms that burrowed in the sand, the shell-fish
that trailed over the mud when the tide was
low, the stranded crab as he scuttled back to
the sea—each and all left some mark to tell
of their former presence. Even the rain that fell[34]
and the very wind that blew sometimes recorded
the direction whence they came, and
we may read in the rocks, also, accounts of
freshets sweeping down with turbid waters, and
of long periods of drouth, when the land was
parched and lakes and rivers shrank beneath
the burning sun.

All these things have been told and retold;
but, as there are many who have not read
Mr. Hutchinson's books and to whom Buckland
is quite unknown, it may be excusable
to add something to what has already been
said in the first chapter of these impressions
of the past.

The very earliest suggestion we have of the
presence of animal life upon this globe is in
the form of certain long dark streaks below
the Cambrian of England, considered to be
traces of the burrows of worms that were filled
with fine mud, and while this interpretation
may be wrong there is, on the other hand, no
reason why it may not be correct. Plant and
animal life must have had very lowly beginnings,
and it is not at all probable that we
shall find any trace of the simple and minute[35]
forms with which they started,[2] though we
should not be surprised at finding hints of the
presence of living creatures below the strata
in which their remains are actually known to
occur.

Worm burrows, to be sure, are hardly footprints,
but tracks are found in Cambrian rocks
just above the strata in which the supposed
burrows occur, and from that time onward
there are tracks a-plenty, for they have been
made, wherever the conditions were favorable,
ever since animals began to walk. All that
was needed was a medium in which impressions
could be made and so filled that there
was imperfect adhesion between mould and
matrix. Thus we find them formed not only
by the sea-shore, in sands alternately dry and
covered, but by the river-side, in shallow water,
or even on land where tracks might be left in
[36]soft or moist earth into which wind-driven
dust or sand might lodge, or sand or mud be
swept by the mimic flood caused by a thunder
shower.

So there are tracks in strata of every age;
at first those of invertebrates: after the worm
burrows the curious complicated trails of animals
believed to be akin to the king crab;
broad, ribbed, ribbon-like paths ascribed to
trilobites; then faint scratches of insects, and
the shallow, palmed prints of salamanders, and
the occasional slender sprawl of a lizard; then
footprints, big and little, of the horde of Dinosaurs
and, finally, miles above the Cambrian,
marks of mammals. Sometimes, like the
tracks of salamanders and reptiles in the carboniferous
rocks of Pennsylvania and Kansas,
these are all we have to tell of the existence
of air-breathing animals. Again, as with the
iguanodon, the foot to fit the track may be
found in the same layer of rock, but this is not
often the case.

Although footprints in the rocks must often
have been seen, they seem to have attracted little
or no notice from scientific men until about[37]
1830 to 1835, when they were almost simultaneously
described both in Europe and America;
even then, it was some time before they
were generally conceded to be actually the
tracks of animals, but, like worm burrows and
trails, were looked upon as the impressions of
sea-weeds.

The now famous tracks in the "brown
stone" of the Connecticut Valley seem to have
first been seen by Pliny Moody in 1802, when
he ploughed up a specimen on his farm, showing
small imprints, which later on were popularly
called the tracks of Noah's raven. The
discovery passed without remark until in 1835
the footprints came under the observation of
Dr. James Deane, who, in turn, called Professor
Hitchcock's attention to them. The latter at
once began a systematic study of these impressions,
publishing his first account in 1836
and continuing his researches for many years,
in the course of which he brought together the
fine collection in Amherst College. At that
time Dinosaurs were practically unknown, and
it is not to be wondered at that these three-toed
tracks, great and small, were almost universally[38]
believed to be those of birds. So it is
greatly to the credit of Dr. Deane, who also
studied these footprints, that he was led to
suspect that they might have been made by
other animals. This suspicion was partly
caused by the occasional association of four
and five-toed prints with the three-toed impressions,
and partly by the rare occurrence of
imprints showing the texture of the sole of the
foot, which was quite different from that of
any known bird.

Fig. 6.—Where a Dinosaur Sat Down.

In the light of our present knowledge we
are able to read many things in these tracks
that were formerly more or less obscure, and
to see in them a complete verification of Dr.
Deane's suspicion that they were not made by
birds. We see clearly that the long tracks[39]
called Anomœpus, with their accompanying
short fore feet, mark where some Dinosaur
squatted down to rest or progressed slowly on
all-fours, as does the kangaroo when feeding
quietly;[3] and we interpret the curious heart-shaped
depression sometimes seen back of the
feet, not as the mark of a stubby tail, but as
made by the ends of the slender pubes, bones
that help form the hip-joints. Then, too, the
mark of the inner, or short first, toe, is often
very evident, although it was a long time before
the bones of this toe were actually found,
and many of the Dinosaurs now known to
have four toes were supposed to have but
three.

It seems strange, and it is strange, that
while so many hundreds of tracks should have
been found in the limited area exposed to view,
so few bones have been found—our knowledge
of the veritable animals that made the tracks
[40]being a blank. A few examples have, it is
true, been found, but these are only a tithe of
those known to have existed; while of the great
animals that strode along the shore, leaving
tracks fifteen inches long and a yard apart
pressed deeply into the hard sand, not a bone
remains. The probability is that the strata
containing their bones lie out to sea, whither
their bodies were carried by tides and currents,
and that we may never see more than the few
fragments that were scattered along the seaside.

That part of the Valley of the Connecticut
wherein the footprints are found seems to have
been a long, narrow estuary running southward
from Turner's Falls, Mass., where the
tracks are most abundant and most clear.
The topography was such that this estuary
was subject to sudden and great fluctuations of
the water-level, large tracts of shore being now
left dry to bake in the sun, and again covered
by turbid water which deposited on the bottom
a layer of mud. Over and over again this
happened, forming layer upon layer of what is
now stone, sometimes the lapse of time between
[41]
the deposits being so short that the
tracks of the big Dinosaurs extend through
several sheets of stone; while again there was a
period of drouth when the shore became so dry
and firm as to retain but a single shallow impression.

Fig. 7.—Footprints of Dinosaurs on the Brownstone of the Connecticut Valley.


From a slab in the museum of Amherst College.

Something of the wealth of animal life that
roamed about this estuary may be gathered
from the number of different footprints recorded
on the sands, and these are so many and
so varied that Professor Hitchcock in two extensive
reports enumerated over 150 species,
representing various groups of animals. One
little point must, however, be borne in mind,
that mere size is no sure indication of differences
in dealing with reptiles, for these long-lived
creatures grow almost continuously
throughout life, so that one animal even may
have left his footprints over and over in assorted
sizes from one end of the valley to the
other.

The slab shown in Fig. 7 is a remarkably
fine example of these Connecticut River footprints;
it shows in relief forty-eight tracks of
the animal called Brontozoum sillimanium and
[42]
six of a lesser species. It was quarried near
Middletown, in 1778, and for sixty years did
duty as a flagstone, fortunately with the face
downwards. When taken up for repairs the
tracks were discovered, and later on the slab,
which measures three by five feet, was transferred
to the museum of Amherst College.

There is an interesting parallel between the
history of footprints in England and America,
for they were noticed at about the same time,
1830, in both countries; in each case the tracks
were in rocks of Triassic age, and, in both instances,
the animals that made them have
never been found. In England, however, the
tracks first found were those ascribed to tortoises,
though a little later Dinosaur footprints
were discovered in the same locality. Oddly
enough these numerous tracks all run one
way, from west to east, as if the animals were
migrating, or were pursuing some well-known
and customary route to their feeding grounds.

For some reason Triassic rocks are particularly
rich in footprints; for from strata of this
same age in the Rhine Valley come those curious
examples so like the mark of a stubby[43]
hand that Dr. Kaup christened the beast supposed
to have made them Cheirotherium, beast
with a hand, suggesting that they had been
made by some gigantic opossum. As the
tracks measure five by eight inches, it would
have been rather a large specimen, but the
mammals had not then arisen, and it is generally
believed that the impressions were made
by huge (for their kind) salamander-like creatures,
known as labyrinthodonts, whose remains
are found in the same strata.

Footprints may aid greatly in determining
the attitude assumed by extinct animals, and
in this way they have been of great service in
furnishing proof that many of the Dinosaurs
walked erect. The impressions on the sands
of the old Connecticut estuary may be said to
show this very plainly, but in England and
Belgium is evidence still more conclusive, in
the shape of tracks ascribed to the Iguanodon.
These were made on soft soil into which the
feet sank much more deeply than in the Connecticut
sands, and the casts made in the natural
moulds show the impression of toes very
clearly. If the animals had walked flat-footed,[44]
as we do, the prints of the toes would have
been followed by a long heel mark, but such
is not the case; there are the sharply defined
marks of the toes and nothing more, showing
plainly that the Iguanodons walked, like birds,
on the toes alone. More than this, had these
Dinosaurs dragged their tails there would have
been a continuous furrow between the footprints;
but nothing of this sort is to be found;
on the contrary, a fine series of tracks, uncovered
at Hastings, England, made by several
individuals and running for seventy-five feet,
shows footprints only. Hence it may be fairly
concluded that these great creatures carried
their tails clear of the ground, as shown in the
picture of Thespesius, the weight of the tail
counterbalancing that of the body. Where
crocodilians or some of the short-limbed Dinosaurs
have crept along there is, as we should
expect, a continuous furrow between the imprints
of the feet. This is what footprints tell
us when their message is read aright; when
improperly translated they only add to the
enormous bulk of our ignorance.

Some years ago we were treated to accounts[45]
of wonderful footprints in the rock of the
prison-yard at Carson City, Nev., which, according
to the papers, not only showed that
men existed at a much earlier period than the
scientific supposed, but that they were men
of giant stature. This was clearly demonstrated
by the footprints, for they were such as
might have been made by huge moccasined
feet, and this was all that was necessary for
the conclusion that they were made by just
such feet. For it is a curious fact that the
majority of mankind seem to prefer any explanation
other than the most simple and natural,
particularly in the case of fossils, and are
always looking for a primitive race of gigantic
men.

Bones of the Mastodon and Mammoth have
again and again been eagerly accepted as those
of giants; a salamander was brought forward
as evidence of the deluge (homo diluvii testis);
ammonites and their allies pose as fossil snakes,
and the "petrified man" flourishes perennially.
However, in this case the prints were recognized
by naturalists as having most probably
been made by some great ground sloth, such[46]
as the Mylodon or Morotherium, these animals,
though belonging to a group whose headquarters
were in Patagonia, having extended
their range as far north as Oregon. That the
tracks seemed to have been made by a biped,
rather than a quadruped, was due to the fact
that the prints of the hind feet fell upon and
obliterated the marks of the fore. Still, a little
observation showed that here and there prints
of the fore feet were to be seen, and on one
spot were indications of a struggle between
two of the big beasts. The mud, or rather
the stone that had been mud, bears the imprints
of opposing feet, one set deeper at the
toes, the other at the heels, as if one animal
had pushed and the other resisted. In the
rock, too, are broad depressions bearing the
marks of coarse hair, where one creature had
apparently sat on its haunches in order to use
its fore limbs to the best advantage. Other
footprints there are in this prison-yard; the
great round "spoor" of the mammoth, the
hoofs of a deer, and the paws of a wolf(?), indicating
that hereabout was some pool where all
these creatures came to drink. More than this,[47]
we learn that when these prints were made, or
shortly after, a strong wind blew from the
southeast, for on that face of the ridges bounding
the margin of each big footprint, we find
sand that lodged against the squeezed-up mud
and stuck there to serve as a perpetual record
of the direction of the wind.

REFERENCES

Almost every museum has some specimen of the Connecticut
Valley footprints, but the largest and finest collections
are in the museums of Amherst College, Mass.,
and Yale University, although, owing to lack of room,
only a few of the Yale specimens are on exhibition.
The collection at Amherst comprises most of the types
described by Professor E. Hitchcock in his "Ichnology of
New England," a work in two fully illustrated quarto
volumes. Other footprints are described and figured by
Dr. J. Deane in "Ichnographs from the Sandstone of
the Connecticut River."

Fig. 8.—The Track of a Three-toed Dinosaur.

[48]

IV

RULERS OF THE ANCIENT SEAS

"A time there was when the universe was darkness and
water, wherein certain animals of frightful and compound
mien were generated. There were serpents, and other creatures
with the mixed shapes of one another...."—The Archaic
Genesis.

History shows us how in the past nation after
nation has arisen, increased in size and strength,
extended its bounds and dominion until it became
the ruling power of the world, and then
passed out of existence, often so completely
that nothing has remained save a few mounds
of dirt marking the graves of former cities.
And so has it been with the kingdoms of
nature. Just as Greece, Carthage, and Rome
were successively the rulers of the sea in the
days that we call old, so, long before the advent
of man, the seas were ruled by successive races
of creatures whose bones now lie scattered
over the beds of the ancient seas, even as the[49]
wrecks of galleys lie strewn over the bed of
the Mediterranean. For a time the armor-clad
fishes held undisputed sway; then their
reign was ended by the coming of the sharks,
who in their turn gave way to the fish-lizards,
the Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs. These, however,
were rather local in their rule; but the
next group of reptiles to appear on the scene,
the great marine reptiles called Mosasaurs,
practically extended their empire around the
world, from New Zealand to North America.

We properly call these reptiles great, for so
they were; but there are degrees of greatness,
and there is a universal tendency to think of
the animals that have become extinct as much
greater than those of the present day, to magnify
the reptile that we never saw as well as
the fish that "got away," and it may be safely
said that the greatest of animals will shrink
before a two-foot rule. As a matter of fact,
no animals are known to have existed that
were larger than the whales; and, while there
are now no reptiles that can compare in bulk
with the Dinosaurs, there were few Mosasaurs
that exceeded in size a first-class Crocodile.[50]
An occasional Mosasaur reaches a length of
forty feet, but such are rare indeed, and one
even twenty-five feet long is a large specimen,[4]
while the great Mugger, or Man-eating Crocodile,
grows, if permitted, to a length of twenty-five
or even thirty feet, and need not be
ashamed to match his bulk and jaws against
those of most Mosasaurs.

The first of these sea-reptiles to be discovered
has passed into history, and now
reposes in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris,
after changing hands two or three times,
the original owner being dispossessed of his
treasure by the subtleties of law, while the
next holder was deprived of the specimen
by main force. Thus the story is told by
M. Faujas St. Fond, as rendered into English,
in Mantell's "Petrifactions and their Teachings":
"Some workmen, in blasting the rock
[51]in one of the caverns of the interior of the
mountain, perceived, to their astonishment, the
jaws of a large animal attached to the roof of
the chasm. The discovery was immediately
made known to M. Hoffman, who repaired to
the spot, and for weeks presided over the arduous
task of separating the mass of stone containing
these remains from the surrounding
rock. His labors were rewarded by the successful
extrication of the specimen, which he
conveyed in triumph to his house. This extraordinary
discovery, however, soon became
the subject of general conversation, and excited
so much interest that the canon of the cathedral
which stands on the mountain resolved to claim
the fossil, in right of being lord of the manor,
and succeeded, after a long and harassing lawsuit,
in obtaining the precious relic. It remained
for years in his possession, and Hoffman
died without regaining his treasure. At
length the French Revolution broke out, and
the armies of the Republic advanced to the
gates of Maestricht. The town was bombarded;
but, at the suggestion of the committee
of savans who accompanied the French[52]
troops to select their share of the plunder, the
artillery was not suffered to play on that part
of the city in which the celebrated fossil was
known to be preserved. In the meantime, the
canon of St. Peter's, shrewdly suspecting the
reason why such peculiar favor was shown to
his residence, removed the specimen and concealed
it in a vault; but, when the city was
taken, the French authorities compelled him
to give up his ill-gotten prize, which was
immediately transmitted to the Jardin des
Plantes, at Paris, where it still forms one of
the most interesting objects in that magnificent
collection." And there it remains to
this day.

Fig. 9.—A Great Sea Lizard, Tylosaurus Dyspelor.


From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson.

The seas that rolled over western Kansas
were the headquarters of the Mosasaurs, and
hundreds—aye, thousands—of specimens
have been taken from the chalk bluffs of that
region, some of them in such a fine state of
preservation that we are not only well acquainted
with their internal structure, but with
their outward appearance as well. They were
essentially swimming lizards—great, overgrown,
and distant relatives of the Monitors
[53]
of Africa and Asia, especially adapted to a
roving, predatory life by their powerful tails
and paddle-shaped feet. Their cup-and-ball
vertebræ indicate great flexibility of the body,
their sharp teeth denote ability to capture slippery
prey, and the structure of the lower jaw
shows that they probably ate in a hurry and
swallowed their food entire, or bolted it in
great chunks. The jaws of all reptiles are
made up of a number of pieces, but these are
usually so spliced together that each half of the
jaw is one inflexible, or nearly inflexible, mass
of bone. In snakes, which swallow their prey
entire, the difficulty of swallowing animals
greater in diameter than themselves is surmounted
by having the two halves of the lower
jaw loosely joined at the free ends, so that
these may spread wide apart and thus increase
the gape of the mouth. This is also helped by
the manner in which the jaw is joined to the
head. The pelican solves the problem by the
length of his mandibles, this allowing so much
spring that when open they bow apart to
form a nice little landing net. In the Mosasaurs,
as in the cormorants, among birds, there
[54]
is a sort of joint in each half of the lower jaw
which permits it to bow outward when opened,
and this, aided by the articulation of the jaw
with the cranium, adds greatly to the swallowing
capacity. Thus in nature the same end is
attained by very different methods. To borrow
a suggestion from Professor Cope, if the
reader will extend his arms at full length, the
palms touching, and then bend his elbows outward
he will get a very good idea of the action
of a Mosasaur's jaw. The western sea
was a lively place in the day of the great
Mosasaurs, for with them swam the king of
turtles, Archelon, as Mr. Wieland has fitly
named him, a creature a dozen feet or more in
length, with a head a full yard long, while in
the shallows prowled great fishes with massive
jaws and teeth like spikes.

Fig. 10.—Jaw of a Mosasaur, Showing the Joint that
Increased the Swallowing Capacity of that Reptile.

There, too, was the great, toothed diver,[55]
Hesperornis (see page 83), while over the
waters flew pterodactyls, with a spread of
wing of twenty feet, largest of all flying
creatures; and, not improbably—nay, very
probably—fish-eaters, too; and when each and
all of these were seeking their dinners, there
were troublous times for the small fry in that
old Kansan sea.

And then there came a change; to the
south, to the west, to the north, the land was
imperceptibly but surely rising, perhaps only
an inch or two in a century, but still rising,
until "The Ocean in which flourished this
abundant and vigorous life was at last completely
inclosed on the west by elevations of
sea-bottom, so that it only communicated with
the Atlantic and Pacific at the Gulf of Mexico
and the Arctic Sea."

The continued elevation of both eastern and
western shores contracted its area, and when
ridges of the sea-bottom reached the surface,
forming long, low bars, parts of the water-area
were included, and connection with salt-water
prevented. Thus were the living beings imprisoned
and subjected to many new risks to[56]
life. The stronger could more readily capture
the weaker, while the fishes would gradually
perish through the constant freshening of the
water. With the death of any considerable
class, the balance of food-supply would be lost,
and many large species would disappear from
the scene. The most omnivorous and enduring
would longest resist the approach of starvation,
but would finally yield to inexorable fate—the
last one caught by the shifting bottom among
shallow pools, from which his exhausted energies
could not extricate him.[5]

Like the "Fossil man" the sea-serpent
flourishes perennially in the newspapers and,
despite the fact that he is now mainly regarded
as a joke, there have been many attempts to
habilitate this mythical monster and place him
on a foundation of firm fact. The most earnest
of these was that of M. Oudemans, who
expressed his belief in the existence of some
rare and huge seal-like creature whose occasional
appearance in southern waters gave rise
[57]to the best authenticated reports of the sea-serpent.
Among other possibilities it has been
suggested that some animal believed to be extinct
had really lived over to the present day.
Now there are a few waifs, spared from the
wrecks of ancient faunas, stranded on the
shores of the present, such as the Australian
Ceratodus and the Gar Pikes of North America,
and these and all other creatures that could
be mustered in were used as proofs to sustain
this theory. If, it was said, these animals
have been spared, why not others? If a fish
of such ancient lineage as the Gar Pike is so
common as to be a nuisance, why may there
not be a few Plesiosaurs or a Mosasaur somewhere
in the depths of the ocean? The argument
was a good one, the more that we may
"suppose" almost anything, but it must be
said that no trace of any of these creatures has
so far been found outside of the strata in which
they have long been known to occur, and all
the probabilities are opposed to this theory.
Still, if some of these creatures had been spared,
they might well have passed for sea-serpents,
even though Zeuglodon, the one most like a[58]
serpent in form, was the one most remotely related
to snakes.

Zeuglodon, the yoke-tooth, so named from
the shape of its great cutting teeth, was indeed
a strange animal, and if we wonder at
the Greenland Whale, whose head is one-third
its total length, we may equally wonder at
Zeuglodon, with four feet of head, ten feet of
body, and forty feet of tail. No one, seeing
the bones of the trunk and tail for the first
time, would suspect that they belonged to the
same animal, for while the vertebræ of the
body are of moderate size, those of the tail
are, for the bulk of creature, the longest
known, measuring from fifteen to eighteen
inches in length, and weighing in a fossil condition
fifty to sixty pounds. In life, the animal
was from fifty to seventy feet in length,
and not more than six or eight feet through
the deepest part of the body, while the tail
was much less; the head was small and
pointed, the jaws well armed with grasping
and cutting teeth, and just back of the head
was a pair of short paddles, not unlike those
of a fur seal. It is curious to speculate on[59]
the habits of a creature in which the tail so
obviously wagged the dog and whose articulations
all point to great freedom of movement
up and down. This may mean that it was an
active diver, descending to great depths to
prey upon squid, as the Sperm-Whale does
to-day, while it seems quite certain that it
must have reared at least a third of its great
length out of water to take a comprehensive
view of its surroundings. And if size is any
indication of power, the great tail, which obviously
ended in flukes like those of a whale,
must have been capable of propelling the beast
at a speed of twenty or thirty miles an hour.
Something of the kind must have been needed
in order that the small head might provide food
enough for the great tail, and it has been suggested
that inability to do this was the reason
why Zeuglodon became extinct. On the other
hand, it has been ingeniously argued that the
huge tail served to store up fat when food was
plenty, which was drawn upon when food became
scarce. The fur seals do something similar
to this, for the males come on shore in
May rolling in blubber, and depart in September[60]
lean and hungry after a three months'
fast.

Zeuglodons must have been very numerous
in the old Gulf of Mexico, for bones are found
abundantly through portions of our Southern
States; it was also an inhabitant of the old
seas of southern Europe, but, as we shall see,
it gave place to the great fossil shark, and this
in turn passed out of existence. Still, common
though its bones may be, stories of their use
for making stone walls—and these stories are
still in circulation—resolve themselves on
close scrutiny into the occasional use of a big
vertebra to support the corner of a corn-crib.

The scientific name of Zeuglodon is Basilosaurus
cetoides, the whale-like king lizard—the
first of these names, Basilosaurus, having been
given to it by the original describer, Dr. Harlan,
who supposed the animal to have been a
reptile. Now it is a primary rule of nomenclature
that the first name given to an animal
must stick and may not be changed, even by
the act of a zoölogical congress, so Zeuglodon
must, so far as its name is concerned, masquerade
as a reptile for the rest of its paleontological[61]
life. This, however, really matters
very little, because scientific names are simply
verbal handles by which we may grasp animals
to describe them, and Dr. Le Conte, to show
how little there may be in a name, called a
beetle Gyascutus. Owen's name of Zeuglodon,
although not tenable as a scientific name, is
too good to be wasted, and being readily remembered
and easily pronounced may be used
as a popular name.

[62]

Fig. 11.—Koch's Hydrarchus, Composed of Portions of the Skeleton of Several Zeuglodons.

One might think that a creature sixty or
seventy feet long was amply long enough, but
Dr. Albert Koch thought otherwise, and did
with Zeuglodon as, later on, he did with the
Mastodon, combining the vertebræ of several
individuals until he had a monster 114 feet
long! This he exhibited in Europe under the
name of Hydrarchus, or water king, finally
disposing of the composite creature to the
Museum of Dresden, where it was promptly
reduced to its proper dimensions. The natural
make-up of Zeuglodon is sufficiently composite
without any aid from man, for the head
and paddles are not unlike those of a seal, the
ribs are like those of a manatee, and the shoulder
[63]
blades are precisely like those of a whale,
while the vertebræ are different from those
of any other animal, even its own cousin and
lesser contemporary Dorudon. There were
also tiny hind legs tucked away beneath skin,
but these, as well as many other parts of the
animal's structure were unknown, until Mr.
Charles Schuchert collected a series of specimens
for the National Museum, from which it
was possible to restore the entire skeleton.
Owing to a rather curious circumstance the
first attempt at a restoration was at fault;
among the bones originally obtained by Mr.
Schuchert there were none from the last half
of the tail, an old gully having cut off the
hinder portion of the backbone and destroyed
the vertebræ. Not far away, however, was a
big lump of stone containing several vertebræ
of just the right size, and these were used as
models to complete the papier-maché skeleton
shown at Atlanta, in 1894. But a year after
Mr. Schuchert collected a series of vertebræ,
beginning with the tip of the tail, and these
showed conclusively that the first lot of tail
vertebræ belonged to a creature still undescribed[64]
and one probably more like a whale
than Zeuglodon himself, whose exact relationships
are a little uncertain, as may be imagined
from what was said of its structure. Mixed
with the bones of Zeuglodon was the shell of
a turtle, nearly three feet long, and part of the
backbone of a great water-snake that must
have been twenty-five feet long, both previously
quite unknown. One more curious
thing about Zeuglodon bones remains to be
told, and then we are done with him; ordinarily
a fossil bone will break indifferently in any
direction, but the bones of Zeuglodon are built,
like an onion, of concentric layers, and these
have a great tendency to peel off during the
preparation of a specimen.

And now, as the wheels of time and change
rolled slowly on, sharks again came uppermost,
and the warmer Eocene and Miocene oceans
appear to have fairly teemed with these sea
wolves. There were small sharks with slender
teeth for catching little fishes, there were
larger sharks with saw-like teeth for cutting
slices out of larger fishes, and there were sharks[65]
that might almost have swallowed the biggest
fish of to-day whole, sharks of a size the waters
had never before contained, and fortunately do
not contain now. We know these monsters
mostly by their teeth, for their skeletons were
cartilaginous, and this absence of their remains
is probably the reason why these creatures are
passed by while the adjectives huge, immense,
enormous are lavished on the Mosasaurs and
Plesiosaurs—animals that the great-toothed
shark, Carcharodon megalodon, might well
have eaten at a meal. For the gaping jaws
of one of these sharks, with its hundreds of
gleaming teeth must, at a moderate estimate,
have measured not less than six feet across.

The great White Shark, the man-eater, so
often found in story books, so rarely met with
in real life, attains a length of thirty feet, and
a man just makes him a good, satisfactory
lunch. Now a tooth of this shark is an inch
and a quarter long, while a tooth of the huge
Megalodon is commonly three, often four, and
not infrequently five inches long. Applying
the rule of three to such a tooth as this would
give a shark 120 feet long, bigger than most[66]
whales, to whom a man would be but a
mouthful, just enough to whet his sharkship's
appetite. Even granting that the rule of three
unduly magnifies the dimensions of the brute,
and making an ample reduction, there would
still remain a fish between seventy-five and
one hundred feet long, quite large enough to
satisfy the most ambitious of tuna fishers, and
to have made bathing in the Miocene ocean
unpopular. Contemporary with the great-toothed
shark was another and closely related
species that originated with him in Eocene
times, and these two may possibly have had
something to do with the extinction of Zeuglodon.
This species is distinguished by having
on either side of the base of the great triangular
cutting teeth a little projection or
cusp, like the "ear" on a jar, so that this species
has been named auriculatus, or eared.
The edges of the teeth are also more saw-like
than in those of its greater relative, and as the
species must have attained a length of fifty or
sixty feet it may, with its better armature,
have been quite as formidable. And, as perhaps
the readers of these pages may know, the[67]
supply of teeth never ran short. Back of each
tooth, one behind another arranged in serried
ranks, lay a reserve of six or seven smaller, but
growing teeth, and whenever a tooth of the
front row was lost, the tooth immediately
behind it took its place, and like a well-trained
soldier kept the front line unbroken. Thus
the teeth of sharks are continually developing
at the back, and all the teeth are steadily
pushing forward, a very simple mechanical
arrangement causing the teeth to lie flat until
they reach the front of the jaw and come
into use.

Once fairly started in life, these huge sharks
spread themselves throughout the warm seas
of the world, for there was none might stand
before them and say nay. They swarmed
along our southern coast, from Maryland to
Texas; they swarmed everywhere that the water
was sufficiently warm, for their teeth occur in
Tertiary strata in many parts of the world, and
the deep-sea dredges of the Challenger and
Albatross have brought up their teeth by scores.
And then—they perished, perished as utterly
as did the hosts of Sennacherib. Why? We do[68]
not know. Did they devour everything large
enough to be eaten throughout their habitat,
and then fall to eating one another? Again,
we do not know. But perish they did, while
the smaller white shark, which came into being
at the same time, still lives, as if to emphasize
the fact that it is best not to overdo things,
and that in the long run the victory is not
always to the largest.

REFERENCES

The finest Mosasaur skeleton ever discovered, an
almost complete skeleton of Tylosaurus dyspelor, 29 feet
in length, may be seen at the head of the staircase leading
to the Hall of Paleontology, in the American Museum
of Natural History, New York. Another good specimen
may be seen in the Yale University Museum, which probably
has the largest collection of Mosasaurs in existence.
Another fine collection is in the Museum of the State
University of Kansas, at Lawrence.

The best Zeuglodon, the first to show the vestigial hind
legs and to make clear other portions of the structure, is
in the United States National Museum.

The great sharks are known in this country by their
teeth only, and, as these are common in the phosphate[69]
beds, specimens may be seen in almost any collection. In
the United States National Museum, the jaws of a twelve-foot
blue shark are shown for comparison. The largest
tooth in that collection is 5-3/4 inches high and 5 inches
across the base. It takes five teeth of the blue shark to
fill the same number of inches.

The Mosasaurs are described in detail by Professor S.
W. Williston, in Vol. IV. of the "University Geological
Survey of Kansas." There is a technical—and, consequently,
uninteresting—account of Zeuglodon in Vol.
XXIII. of the "Proceedings of the United States National
Museum," page 327.

Fig. 12.—A Tooth of Zeuglodon, one of the "Yoke
Teeth," from which it derives the name.

[70]

V

BIRDS OF OLD

When we come to discuss the topic of the earliest
bird—not the one in the proverb—our
choice of subjects is indeed limited, being restricted
to the famous and oft-described Archæopteryx
from the quarries of Solenhofen, which
at present forms the starting-point in the history
of the feathered race. Bird-like, or at
least feathered, creatures, must have existed
before this, as it is improbable that feathers
and flight were acquired at one bound, and
this lends probability to the view that at least
some of the tracks in the Connecticut Valley
are really the footprints of birds. Not birds as
we now know them, but still creatures wearing
feathers, these being the distinctive badge and
livery of the order. For we may well speak
[71]
of the feathered race, the exclusive prerogative
of the bird being not flight but feathers; no
bird is without them, no other creature wears
them, so that birds may be exactly defined in
two words, feathered animals. Reptiles, and
even mammals, may go quite naked or cover
themselves with a defensive armor of bony
plates or horny scales; but under the blaze of
the tropical sun or in the chill waters of arctic
seas birds wear feathers only, although in the
penguins the feathers have become so changed
that their identity is almost lost.

[72]

Fig. 13.—Archæopteryx, the Earliest Known Bird.


From the specimen in the Berlin Museum.

So far as flight goes, there is one entire order
of mammals, whose members, the bats, are
quite as much at home in the air as the birds
themselves, and in bygone days the empire of
the air belonged to the pterodactyls; even frogs
and fishes have tried to fly, and some of the
latter have nearly succeeded in the attempt.
As for wings, it may be said that they are
made on very different patterns in such animals
as the pterodactyl, bat, and bird, and that
while the end to be achieved is the same, it is
reached by very different methods. The wing
membrane of a bat is spread between his out-[73]stretched
fingers, the thumb alone being left
free, while in the pterodactyl the thumb is
wanting and the membrane supported only by
what in us is the little finger, a term that is a
decided misnomer in the case of the pterodactyl.
In birds the fingers have lost their individuality,
and are modified for the attachment
or support of the wing feathers, but in
Archæopteryx the hand had not reached this
stage, for the fingers were partly free and
tipped with claws.

Fig. 14.—Nature's Four Methods of Making a Wing.
Bat, Pterodactyl, Archæopteryx, and Modern Bird.

We get some side lights on the structure of
primitive birds by studying the young and the
earlier stages of living species, for in a very
general way it may be said that the development
of the individual is a sort of rough sketch
or hasty outline of the development of the class
of which it is a member; thus the transitory
stages through which the chick passes before
hatching give us some idea of the structure of
the adult birds or bird-like creatures of long
ago. Now, in embryonic birds the wing ends
in a sort of paw and the fingers are separate,
quite different from what they become a little
later on, and not unlike their condition in[74]
Archæopteryx, and even more like what is
found in the wing of an ostrich.

Then, too, there are a few birds still left,
such as the ostrich, that have not kept pace
with the others, and are a trifle more like
reptiles than the vast majority of their relatives,
and these help a little in explaining the
structure of early birds. Among these is a
queer bird with a queer name, Hoactzin, found
in South America, which when young uses its
little wings much like legs, just as we may
suppose was done by birds of old, to climb
about the branches. Mr. Quelch, who has
studied these curious birds in their native wilds
of British Guiana, tells us that soon after hatching,
the nestlings begin to crawl about by means
of their legs and wings, the well-developed
claws on the thumb and finger being constantly
in use for hooking to surrounding objects. If
they are drawn from the nest by means of their
legs, they hold on firmly to the twigs, both with
their bill and wings; and if the nest be upset
they hold on to all objects with which they
come in contact by bill, feet, and wings, making
considerable use of the bill, with the help[75]
of the clawed wings, to raise themselves to a
higher level.

Fig. 15.—Young Hoactzins.

Thus, by putting these various facts together
we obtain some pretty good ideas regarding the
appearance and habits of the first birds. The
immediate ancestors of birds, their exact point[76]
of departure from other vertebrates, is yet to be
discovered; at one time it was considered that
they were the direct descendants of Dinosaurs,
or that at least both were derived from the
same parent forms, and while that view was
almost abandoned, it is again being brought forward
with much to support it. It has also been
thought that birds and those flying reptiles, the
pterodactyls, have had a common ancestry, and
the possibility of this is still entertained. Be
that as it may, it is safe to consider that back
in the past, earlier than the Jurassic, were creatures
neither bird nor reptile, but possessing
rudimentary feathers and having the promise
of a wing in the structure of their fore legs,
and some time one of these animals may come
to light; until then Archæopteryx remains the
earliest known bird.

In the Jurassic, then, when the Dinosaurs
were the lords of the earth and small mammals
just beginning to appear, we come upon traces
of full-fledged birds. The first intimation of
their presence was the imprint of a single feather
found in that ancient treasure-house, the Solenhofen
quarries; but as Hercules was revealed[77]
by his foot, so the bird was made evident by
the feather whose discovery was announced
August 15, 1861. And a little later, in September
of the same year, the bird itself turned
up, and in 1877 a second specimen was found,
the two representing two species, if not two
distinct genera. These were very different
from any birds now living—so different, indeed,
and bearing such evident traces of their reptilian
ancestry, that it is necessary to place them
apart from other animals in a separate division
of the class birds.

Archæopteryx was considerably smaller than
a crow, with a stout little head armed with
sharp teeth (as scarce as hens' teeth was no
joke in that distant period), while as he fluttered
through the air he trailed after him a tail
longer than his body, beset with feathers on
either side. Everyone knows that nowadays
the feathers of a bird's tail are arranged like
the sticks of a fan, and that the tail opens and
shuts like a fan. But in Archæopteryx the
feathers were arranged in pairs, a feather on
each side of every joint of the tail, so that on a
small scale the tail was something like that of[78]
a kite; and because of this long, lizard-like tail
this bird and his immediate kith and kin are
placed in a group dubbed Saururæ, or lizard
tailed.

Because impressions of feathers are not found
all around these specimens some have thought
that they were confined to certain portions of
the body—the wings, tail, and thighs—the
other parts being naked. There seems, however,
no good reason to suppose that such was
the case, for it is extremely improbable that
such perfect and important feathers as those of
the wings and tail should alone have been developed,
while there are many reasons why the
feathers of the body might have been lost before
the bird was covered by mud, or why their
impressions do not show.

It was a considerable time after the finding
of the first specimen that the presence of teeth
in the jaws was discovered, partly because the
British Museum specimen was imperfect,[6] and
partly because no one suspected that birds had
ever possessed teeth, and so no one ever looked
[79]for them. When, in 1877, a more complete
example was found, the existence of teeth was
unmistakably shown; but in the meantime,
in February, 1873, Professor Marsh had announced
the presence of teeth in Hesperornis,
and so to him belongs the credit of being the
discoverer of birds with teeth.

The next birds that we know are from our
own country, and although separated by an interval
of thousands of years from the Jurassic
Archæopteryx, time enough for the members
of one group to have quite lost their wings, they
still retain teeth, and in this respect the most
bird-like of them is quite unlike any modern bird.
These come from the chalk beds of western
Kansas, and the first specimens were obtained
by Professor Marsh in his expeditions of 1870
and 1871, but not until a few years later, after
the material had been cleaned and was being
studied, was it ascertained that these birds were
armed with teeth. The smaller of these birds,
which was apparently not unlike a small gull
in general appearance, was, saving its teeth, so
thoroughly a bird that it may be passed by without
further notice, but the larger was remarkable[80]
in many ways. Hesperornis, the western
bird, was a great diver, in some ways the greatest
of the divers, for it stood higher than the
king penguin, though more slender and graceful
in general build, looking somewhat like an
overgrown, absolutely wingless loon.

The penguins, as everyone knows, swim with
their front limbs—we can't call them wings—which,
though containing all the bones of a
wing, have become transformed into powerful
paddles; Hesperornis, on the other hand, swam
altogether with its legs—swam so well with
them, indeed, that through disuse the wings
dwindled away and vanished, save one bone.
This, however, is not stating the theory quite
correctly; of course the matter cannot be actually
proved. Hesperornis was a large bird, upwards
of five feet in length, and if its ancestors
were equally bulky their wings were quite
too large to be used in swimming under water,
as are those of such short-winged forms as the
Auks which fly under the water quite as much
as they fly over it. Hence the wings were
closely folded upon the body so as to offer the
least possible resistance, and being disused, they[81]
and their muscles dwindled, while the bones
and muscles of the legs increased by constant
use. By the time the wings were small enough
to be used in so dense a medium as water the
muscles had become too feeble to move them,
and so degeneration proceeded until but one
bone remained, a mere vestige of the wing that
had been. The penguins retain their great
breast muscles, and so did the Great Auk, because
their wings are used in swimming, since
it requires even more strength to move a small
wing in water than it does to move a large
wing in the thinner air. As for our domesticated
fowls—the turkeys, chickens, and ducks—there
has not been sufficient lapse of time
for their muscles to dwindle, and besides artificial
selection, the breeding of fowls for food
has kept up the mere size of the muscles, although
these lack the strength to be found in
those of wild birds.

As a swimming bird, one that swims with its
legs and not with its wings, Hesperornis has
probably never been equalled, for the size and
appearance of the bones indicate great power,
while the bones of the foot were so joined to[82]
those of the leg as to turn edgewise as the foot
was brought forward and thus to offer the least
possible resistance to the water. It is a remarkable
fact that the leg bones of Hesperornis
are hollow, remarkable because as a rule the
bones of aquatic animals are more or less solid,
their weight being supported by the water; but
those of the great diver were almost as light as
if it had dwelt upon the dry land. That it did
not dwell there is conclusively shown by its
build, and above all by its feet, for the foot of
a running bird is modified in quite another
way.

The bird was probably covered with smooth,
soft feathers, something like those of an Apteryx;
this we know because Professor Williston
found a specimen showing the impression of
the skin of the lower part of the leg as well as
of the feathers that covered the "thigh" and
head. While such a covering seems rather inadequate
for a bird of such exclusively aquatic
habits as Hesperornis must have been, there
seems no getting away from the facts in the
case in the shape of Professor Williston's specimen,
and we have in the Snake Bird, one of
[83]the most aquatic of recent birds, an instance of
similarly poor covering. As all know who have
seen this bird at home, its feathers shed the water
very imperfectly, and after long-continued
submersion become saturated, a fact which partly
accounts for the habit the bird has of hanging
itself out to dry.

Fig. 16.—Hesperornis, the Great Toothed Diver.


From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson.

The restoration which Mr. Gleeson has drawn
differs radically from any yet made, and is the
result of a careful study of the specimen belonging
to the United States National Museum.
No one can appreciate the peculiarities of Hesperornis
and its remarkable departures from
other swimming birds who has not seen the
skeleton mounted in a swimming attitude.
The great length of the legs, their position at
the middle of the body, the narrowness of the
body back of the hip joint, and the disproportionate
length of the outer toe are all brought
out in a manner which a picture of the bird
squatting upon its haunches fails utterly to
show. As for the tail, it is evident from the
size and breadth of the bones that something
of the kind was present; it is also evident that
it was not like that of an ordinary bird, and so[84]
it has been drawn with just a suggestion of
Archæopteryx about it.

The most extraordinary thing about Hesperornis,
however, is the position of the legs relative
to the body, and this is something that
was not even suspected until the skeleton was
mounted in a swimming attitude. As anyone
knows who has watched a duck swim, the usual
place for the feet and legs is beneath and in a
line with the body. But in our great extinct
diver the articulations of the leg bones are such
that this is impossible, and the feet and lower
joint of the legs (called the tarsus) must have
stood out nearly at right angles to the body,
like a pair of oars. This is so peculiar and
anomalous an attitude for a bird's legs that,
although apparently indicated by the shape of
the bones, it was at first thought to be due
to the crushing and consequent distortion to
which the bones had been subjected, and an
endeavor was made to place the legs in the
ordinary position, even though this was done
at the expense of some little dislocation of the
joints. But when the mounting of the skeleton
had advanced further it became more[85]
evident that Hesperornis was not an ordinary
bird, and that he could not have swum in the
usual manner, since this would have brought his
great knee-caps up into his body, which would
have been uncomfortable. And so, at the cost
of some little time and trouble,[7] the mountings
were so changed that the legs stood out at
the sides of the body, as shown in the picture.

A final word remains to be said about
toothed birds, which is, that the visitor who
looks upon one for the first time will probably
be disappointed. The teeth are so loosely implanted
in the jaw that most of them fall out
shortly after death, while the few that remain
are so small as not to attract observation.

By the time the Eocene Period was reached,
even before that, birds had become pretty
much what we now see them, and very little
[86]change has taken place in them since that
time; they seem to have become so exactly
adapted to the conditions of existence that no
further modification has taken place. This
may be expressed in another way, by saying
that while the Mammals of the Eocene have
no near relatives among those now living,
entire large groups having passed completely
out of existence, the few birds that we know
might, so far as their appearance and affinities
go, have been killed yesterday.

Were we to judge of the former abundance
of birds by the number we find in a fossil
state, we should conclude that in the early
days of the world they were remarkably scarce,
for bird bones are among the rarest of fossils.
But from the high degree of development evidenced
by the few examples that have come
to light, and the fact that these represent
various and quite distinct species,[8] we are led
[87]to conclude that birds were abundant enough,
but that we simply do not find them.

Several eggs, too—or, rather, casts of eggs—have
lately been found in the Cretaceous
and Miocene strata of the West; and, as eggs
and birds are usually associated, we are liable
at any time to come upon the bones of the
birds that laid them.

To the writer's mind no thoroughly satisfactory
explanation has been given for the scarcity
of bird remains; but the reason commonly
advanced is that, owing to their lightness,
dead birds float for a much longer time than
other animals, and hence are more exposed to
the ravages of the weather and the attacks of
carrion-feeding animals. It has also been said
that the power of flight enabled birds to
escape calamities that caused the death of contemporary
animals; but all birds do not fly;
and birds do fall victims to storms, cold, and
starvation, and even perish of pestilence, like
the Cormorants of Bering Island, whose ranks
have twice been decimated by disease.

It is true that where carnivorous animals
abound, dead birds do disappear quickly; and[88]
my friend Dr. Stejneger tells me that, while
hundreds of dead sea-fowl are cast on the
shores of the Commander Islands, it is a rare
thing to find one after daylight, as the bodies
are devoured by the Arctic foxes that prowl
about the shores at night. But, again, as in
the Miocene of Southern France and in the
Pliocene of Oregon, remains of birds are fairly
numerous, showing that, under proper conditions,
their bones are preserved for future
reference, so that we may hope some day to
come upon specimens that will enable us to
round out the history of bird life in the past.

REFERENCES

The first discovered specimen of Archæopteryx, Archæopteryx
macrura, is in the British Museum, the second
more complete example is in the Royal Museum of Natural
History, Berlin. The largest collection of toothed
birds, including the types of Hesperornis, Ichthyornis
and others, is in the Yale University Museum, at New
Haven. The United States National Museum at Washington
has a fine mounted skeleton of Hesperornis, and
the State University of Kansas, at Lawrence, has the example
showing the impressions of feathers.

[89]

For scientific descriptions of these birds the reader is
referred to Owen's paper "On the Archæopteryx of von
Meyer, with a Description of the Fossil Remains, etc.," in
the "Transactions of the Philosophical Society of London
for 1863," page 33, and "Odontornithes, a Monograph
of the Extinct Toothed Birds of North America," by O.
C. Marsh. Much popular and scientific information
concerning the early birds is to be found in Newton's
"Dictionary of Birds," and "The Story of Bird Life,"
by W. P. Pycraft; the "Structure and Life of Birds,"
by F. W. Headley; "The Story of the Birds," by J.
Newton Baskett.

Fig. 17.—Archæopteryx as Restored by Mr. Pycraft.

[90]

VI

THE DINOSAURS

A few million years ago, geologists and physicists
do not agree upon the exact number,
although both agree upon the millions, when
the Rocky Mountains were not yet born and
the now bare and arid western plains a land
of lakes, rivers, and luxuriant vegetation, the
region was inhabited by a race of strange and
mighty reptiles upon whom science has bestowed
the appropriate name of Dinosaurs, or
terrible lizards.

Our acquaintance with the Dinosaurs is
comparatively recent, dating from the early
part of the nineteenth century, and in America,
at least, the date may be set at 1818, when
the first Dinosaur remains were found in the
Valley of the Connecticut, although they naturally
were not recognized as such, nor had the
[91]term been devised. The first Dinosaur to be
formally recognized as representing quite a
new order of reptiles was the carnivorous
Megalosaur, found near Oxford, England, in
1824.

Fig. 18.—Thespesius. A Common Herbivorous Dinosaur of the Cretaceous.


From a drawing by Charles R. Knight.

For a long time our knowledge of Dinosaurs
was very imperfect and literally fragmentary,
depending mostly upon scattered
teeth, isolated vertebræ, or fragments of bone
picked up on the surface or casually encountered
in some mine or quarry. Now, however,
thanks mainly to the labors of American palæontologists,
thanks also to the rich deposits
of fossils in our Western States, we have an
extensive knowledge of the Dinosaurs, of their
size, structure, habits, and general appearance.

There are to-day no animals living that are
closely related to them; none have lived for a
long period of time, for the Dinosaurs came to
an end in the Cretaceous, and it can only be
said that the crocodiles, on the one hand, and
the ostriches, on the other, are the nearest existing
relatives of these great reptiles.

For, though so different in outward appearance,
birds and reptiles are structurally quite[92]
closely allied, and the creeping snake and the
bird on which it preys are relatives, although
any intimate relationship between them is of
the serpent's making, and is strongly objected
to by the bird.

But if we compare the skeleton of a Dinosaur
with that of an ostrich—a young one is
preferable—and with those of the earlier birds,
we shall find that many of the barriers now existing
between reptiles and birds are broken
down, and that they have many points in common.
In fact, save in the matter of clothes,
wherein birds differ from all other animals, the
two great groups are not so very far apart.

The Dinosaurs were by no means confined
to North America, although the western United
States seem to have been their headquarters,
but ranged pretty much over the world, for
their remains have been found in every continent,
even in far-off New Zealand.

In point of time they ranged from the Trias
to the Upper Cretaceous, their golden age,
marking the culminating point of reptilian life,
being in the Jurassic, when huge forms stalked
by the sea-shore, browsed amid the swamps, or[93]
disported themselves along the reedy margins
of lakes and rivers.

They had their day, a day of many thousand
years, and then passed away, giving
place to the superior race of mammals which
was just springing into being when the huge
Dinosaurs were in the heyday of their existence.

And it does seem as if in the dim and distant
past, as in the present, brains were a potent
factor in the struggle for supremacy; for,
though these reptiles were giants in size, dominating
the earth through mere brute force,
they were dwarfs in intellect.

The smallest human brain that is thought to
be compatible with life itself weighs a little
over ten ounces, the smallest that can exist
with reasoning powers is two pounds; this in a
creature weighing from 120 to 150 pounds.

What do we find among Dinosaurs? Thespesius,
or Claosaurus, which may have walked
where Baltimore now stands, was twenty-five
feet in length and stood a dozen feet high in
his bare feet, had a brain smaller than a man's
clenched fist, weighing less than one pound.

[94]

Brontosaurus, in some respects the biggest
brute that ever walked, was but little better off,
and Triceratops, and his relatives, creatures
having twice the bulk of an elephant, weighing
probably over ten tons, possessed a brain weighing
not over two pounds!

How much of what we term intelligence
could such a creature possess—what was the
extent of its reasoning powers? Judging from
our own standpoint and the small amount of
intellect apparent in some humans with much
larger brains, these big reptiles must have
known just about enough to have eaten when
they were hungry, anything more was superfluous.

However, intelligence is one thing, life another,
and the spinal cord, with its supply of
nerve-substance, doubtless looked after the
mere mechanical functions of life; and while
even the spinal cord is in many cases quite
small, in some places, particularly in the sacral
region, it is subject to considerable enlargement.
This is notably true of Stegosaurus,
where the sacral enlargement is twenty times
the bulk of the puny brain—a fact noted by[95]
Professor Marsh, and seized upon by the newspapers,
which announced that he had discovered
a Dinosaur with a brain in its pelvis.

In their great variety of size and shape the
Dinosaurs form an interesting parallel with
the Marsupials of Australia. For just as
these are, as it were, an epitome of the class
of mammals, mimicking the herbivores, carnivores,
rodents and even monkeys, so there
are carnivorous and herbivorous Dinosaurs—Dinosaurs
that dwelt on land and others that
habitually resided in the water, those that
walked upright and those that crawled about
on all fours; and, while there are no hints that
any possessed the power of flight, some members
of the group are very bird-like in form
and structure, so much so that it has been
thought that the two may have had a common
ancestry.

The smallest of the Dinosaurs whose acquaintance
we have made were little larger
than chickens; the largest claim the distinction
of being the largest known quadrupeds
that have walked the face of the earth, the
giants not only of their day, but of all time,[96]
before whose huge frames
the bones of the Mammoth,
that familiar byword
for all things great,
seem slight.

Fig. 19—A Hind Leg
of the Great Brontosaurus,
the Largest of the Dinosaurs.

For Brontosaurus, the
Thunder Lizard, beneath
whose mighty tread the
earth shook, and his kindred
were from 40 to 60
feet long and 10 to 14 feet
high, their thigh bones
measuring 5 to 6 feet in
length, being the largest
single bones known to
us, while some of the
vertebræ were 4-1/2 feet
high, exceeding in dimensions
those of a whale.

The group to
which Brontosaurus
belongs, including
Diplodocus and
Morosaurus, is distinguished
by a[97]
large, though rather short, body, very long
neck and tail, and, for the size of the animal,
a very small head. In fact, the head was so
small and, in the case of Diplodocus, so poorly
provided with teeth that it must
have been quite a task, or a long-continued
pleasure, according to
the state of its digestive
apparatus,
for the animal to
have eaten its daily
meal.

Fig. 20.—A Single Vertebra of
Brontosaurus.

An elephant
weighing 5 tons
eats 100 pounds of
hay and 25 pounds
of grain for his
day's ration; but,
as this food is in a
comparatively concentrated
form, it
would require at least twice this weight of
green fodder.

It is a difficult matter to estimate the weight
of a live Diplodocus or a Brontosaurus, but it[98]
is pretty safe to say that it would not be far
from 20 tons, and that one would devour at
the very least something over 700 pounds of
leaves or twigs or plants each day—more, if
the animal felt really hungry.

But here we must, even if reluctantly, curb
our imagination a little and consider another
point: the cold-blooded, sluggish reptiles, as
we know them to-day, do not waste their energies
in rapid movements, or in keeping the
temperature of their bodies above that of the
air, and so by no means require the amount
of food needed by more active, warm-blooded
animals. Alligators, turtles, and snakes will
go for weeks, even months, without food, and
while this applies more particularly to those
that dwell in temperate climes and during
their winter hibernation practically suspend
the functions of digestion and respiration, it is
more or less true of all reptiles. And as there
is little reason for supposing that reptiles behaved
in the past any differently from what
they do in the present, these great Dinosaurs
may, after all, not have been gifted with such
ravenous appetites as one might fancy. Still,[99]
it is dangerous to lay down any hard and fast
laws concerning animals, and he who writes
about them is continually obliged to qualify
his remarks—in sporting parlance, to hedge
a little, and in the present instance there is
some reason, based on the arrangement of
vertebræ and ribs, to suppose that the lungs
of Dinosaurs were somewhat like those of
birds, and that, as a corollary, their blood may
have been better aërated and warmer than
that of living reptiles. But, to return to the
question of food.

From the peculiar character of the articulations
of the limb-bones, it is inferred that these
animals were largely aquatic in their habits,
and fed on some abundant species of water
plants. One can readily see the advantage of
the long neck in browsing off the vegetation
on the bottom of shallow lakes, while the animal
was submerged, or in rearing the head
aloft to scan the surrounding shores for the
approach of an enemy. Or, with the tail as a
counterpoise, the entire body could be reared
out of water and the head be raised some thirty
feet in the air.

[100]

Triceratops, he of the three-horned face, had
a remarkable skull which projected backward
over the neck, like a fireman's helmet, or a
sunbonnet worn hind side before, while over
each eye was a massive horn directed forward,
a third, but much smaller horn being sometimes
present on the nose.

The little "Horned Toad," which isn't a
toad at all, is the nearest suggestion we have
to-day of Triceratops; but, could he realize
the ambition of the frog in the fable and
swell himself to the dimensions of an ox, he
would even then be but a pigmy compared
with his ancient and distant relative.

So far as mere appearance goes he would
compare very well, for while so much is said
about the strange appearance of the Dinosaurs,
it is to be borne in mind that their peculiarities
are enhanced by their size, and that there
are many lizards of to-day that lack only
stature to be even more bizarre; and, for example,
were the Australian Moloch but big
enough, he could give even Stegosaurus
"points" in more ways than one.

Standing before the skull of Triceratops,
[101]looking him squarely in the face, one notices
in front of each eye a thick guard of projecting
bone, and while this must have interfered with
vision directly ahead it must have also furnished
protection for the eye. So long as Triceratops
faced an adversary he must have
been practically invulnerable, but as he was
the largest animal of his time, upward of
twenty-five feet in length, it is probable that
his combats were mainly with those of his own
kind and the subject of dispute some fair female
upon whom two rival suitors had cast
covetous eyes. What a sight it would have
been to have seen two of these big brutes in
mortal combat as they charged upon each
other with all the impetus to be derived from
ten tons of infuriate flesh! We may picture to
ourselves horn clashing upon horn, or glancing
from each bony shield until some skilful stroke
or unlucky slip placed one combatant at the
mercy of the other, and he went down before
the blows of his adversary "as falls on Mount
Alvernus a thunder-smitten oak."

A pair of Triceratops horns in the National
Museum bears witness to such encounters, for[102]
one is broken midway between tip and base;
and that it was broken during life is evident
from the fact that the stump is healed and
rounded over, while the size of the horns shows
that their owner reached a ripe old age.

Fig. 21.—Moloch. A Modern Lizard that Surpasses the Stegosaurs in All but Size.


From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson.

For, unlike man and the higher vertebrates,
reptiles and fishes do not have a maximum
standard of size which is soon reached and
rarely exceeded, but continue to grow
throughout life, so that the size of a turtle, a
crocodile, or a Dinosaur tells something of the
duration of its life.

Before quitting Triceratops let us glance for
a moment at its skeleton. Now among other
things a skeleton is the solution of a problem
in mechanics, and in Triceratops the head so
dominates the rest of the structure that one
might almost imagine the skull was made first
and the body adjusted to it. The great head
seems made not only for offence and defence;
the spreading frill serves for the attachment
of muscles to sustain the weight of the skull,
while the work of the muscles is made easier
by the fact that the frill reaches so far back
of the junction of head with neck as to largely[103]
counterbalance the
weight of the face
and jaws. When
we restored the
skull of this animal
it was found
that the centre of
gravity lay back of
the eye. Several
of the bones of the
neck are united in
one mass to furnish
a firm attachment
for the muscles
that support
and move the
skull, but as the
movements of the
neck are already
restricted by the
overhanging frill,
this loss of motion
is no additional disadvantage.

TRICERATOPS PRORSUS Marsh
Fig. 22.—Skeleton of Triceratops.

To support all[104]
this weight of skull and body requires very
massive legs, and as the fore legs are very
short, this enables Triceratops to browse comfortably
from the ground by merely lowering
the front of the head.

These forms we have been considering were
the giants of the group, but a commoner species,
Thespesius, though less in bulk than those
just mentioned, was still of goodly proportions,
for, as he stalked about, the top of his head
was twelve feet from the ground.

Thespesius and his kin seem to have been
comparatively abundant, for they have a wide
distribution, and many specimens, some almost
perfect, have been discovered in this country
and abroad. No less than twenty-nine Iguanodons,
a European relative of Thespesius,
were found in one spot in mining for coal at
Bernissart, Belgium. Here, during long years
of Cretaceous time, a river slowly cut its way
through the coal-bearing strata to a depth of
750 feet, a depth almost twice as great as
the deepest part of the gorge of Niagara,
and then, this being accomplished, began the
work of filling up the valley it had excavated.

[105]

It was then a sluggish stream with marshy
borders, a stream subject to frequent floods,
when the water, turbid with mud and laden
with sand, overflowed its banks, leaving them,
as the waters subsided, covered thickly with
mud. Here, amidst the luxuriant vegetation
of a semi-tropical climate, lived and died the
Iguanodons, and here the pick of the miner
rescued them from their long entombment to
form part of the treasures of the museum at
Brussels.

Like other reptiles, living and extinct, Thespesius
was continually renewing his teeth, so
that as fast as one tooth was worn out it was
replaced by another, a point wherein Thespesius
had a decided advantage over ourselves.
On the other hand, as there was a reserve supply
of something like 400 teeth in the lower
jaw alone, what an opportunity for the toothache!

And then we have a multitude of lesser Dinosaurs,
including the active, predatory species
with sharp claws and double-edged teeth.
Megalosaurus, the first of the Dinosaurs to be
really known, was one of these carnivorous[106]
species, and from our West comes a near relative,
Ceratosaurus, the nose-horned lizard, a
queer beast with tiny fore legs, powerful, sharp-clawed
hind feet, and well-armed jaws. A
most formidable foe he seems, the more that
the hollow bones speak of active movements,
and Professor Cope pictured him, or a near
relative, vigorously engaged in combat with
his fellows, or preying upon the huge but helpless
herbivores of the marshes, leaping, biting,
and tearing his enemy to pieces with tooth and
claw.

Professor Osborn, on the other hand, is inclined
to consider him as a reptilian hyena,
feeding upon carrion, although one can but
feel that such an armament is not entirely in
the interests of peace.

Last, but by no means least, are the Stegosaurs,
or plated lizards, for not only were they
beasts of goodly size, but they were among the
most singular of all known animals, singular
even for Dinosaurs. They had diminutive
heads, small fore legs, long tails armed on
either side near the tip, with two pairs of large
spines, while from these spines to the neck
[107]ran series of large, but thin, and sharp-edged
plates standing on edge, so that their backs
looked like the bottom of a boat provided with
a number of little centreboards. Just how
these plates were arranged is not decided beyond
a peradventure, but while originally figured
as having them in a single series down
the back it seems much more probable that
they formed parallel rows.

Fig. 23.—The Horned Ceratosaurus. A Carnivorous Dinosaur.


From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson.

The largest of these plates were two feet in
height and length, and not more than an inch
thick, except at the base, where they were enlarged
and roughened to give a firm hold to
the thick skin in which they were imbedded.
Be it remembered, too, that these plates and
spines were doubtless covered with horn, so
that they were even longer in life than as we
now see them. The tail spines varied in length,
according to the species, from eight or nine
inches to nearly three feet, and some of them
have a diameter of six inches at the base.
They were swung by a tail eight to ten feet
long, and as a visitor was heard to remark, one
wouldn't like to be about such an animal in
fly time.

[108]

Such were some of the strange and mighty
animals that once roamed this continent from
the valley of the Connecticut, where they literally
left their footprints on the sands of time,
to the Rocky Mountains, where the ancient
lakes and rivers became cemeteries for the entombment
of their bones.

The labor of the collector has gathered their
fossil remains from many a Western canyon,
the skill of the preparator has removed them
from their stony sepulchres and the study of
the anatomist has restored them as they were
in life.

REFERENCES.

Most of our large museums have on exhibition fine
specimens of many Dinosaurs, comprising skulls, limbs,
and large portions of their skeletons. The American
Museum of Natural History, New York, has the largest
and finest display. The first actual skeleton of a Dinosaur
to be mounted in this country was the splendid Claosaurus
at the Yale University Museum, where other striking
pieces are also to be seen. The mounting of this
Claosaurus, which is 29 feet long and 13 feet high, took
an entire year. The United States National Museum is[109]
particularly rich in examples of the great, horned Triceratops,
while the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, has
the best Diplodocus. The Field Columbian Museum and
the Universities of Wyoming and Colorado all have good
collections.

Fig. 24.—Stegosaurus. An Armored Dinosaur of the Jurassic.


From a drawing by Charles R. Knight.

The largest single bone of a Dinosaur is the thigh
bone of a Brontosaurus in the Field Columbian Museum,
this measuring 6 feet 8 inches in length. The height of
a complete hind leg in the American Museum of Natural
History is 10 feet, while a single claw measures 6 by 9
inches. The skeleton of Triceratops restored in papier-maché
for the Pan-American Exposition measured 25
feet from tip of nose to end of tail and was 10 feet 6
inches to the top of the backbone over the hips, this being
the highest point. The head in the United States National
Museum used as a model is 5 feet 6 inches long
in a straight line and 4 feet 3 inches across the frill.
There is a skull in the Yale University Museum even
larger than this.

Articles relating to Dinosaurs are mostly technical in
their nature and scattered through various scientific journals.
The most accessible probably is "The Dinosaurs of
North America," by Professor O. C. Marsh, published as
part of the sixteenth annual report of the United States
Geological Survey. This contains many figures of the
skulls, bones, and entire skeletons of many Dinosaurs.

[110]

Fig. 25.—Skull of Ceratosaurus.


From a specimen in the United States National Museum.

[111]

VII

READING THE RIDDLES OF THE ROCKS

It is quite possible that the reader may wish
to know something of the manner in which
the specimens described in these pages have
been gathered, how we acquire our knowledge
of Brontosaurus, Claosaurus, or any of the
many other "sauruses," and how their restorations
have been made.

There was a time, not so very long ago,
when fossils were looked upon as mere sports
of Nature, and little attention paid to them;
later their true nature was recognized, though
they were merely gathered haphazard as occasion
might offer. But now, and for many
years past, the fossil-bearing rocks of many
parts of the world have been systematically
worked, and from the material thus obtained[112]
we have acquired a great deal of information
regarding the inhabitants of the ancient world.
This is particularly true of our own western
country, where a vast amount of collecting has
been done, although very much remains to be
done in the matter of perfecting this knowledge,
and hosts of new animals remain to be
discovered. For this information we are almost
as much indebted to the collector who has
gathered the needed material, and the preparator
whose patience and skill have made it
available for study, as to the palæontologist
who has interpreted the meaning of the
bones.

To collect successfully demands not only
a knowledge of the rocks in which fossils
occur and of the localities where they are best
exposed to view, but an eye quick to detect a
piece of bone protruding from a rock or lying
amongst the shale, and, above all, the ability
to work a deposit to advantage after it has
been found. The collector of living animals
hies to regions where there is plenty for bird
and beast to eat and drink, but the collector of
extinct animals cares little for what is on the[113]
surface of the earth; his great desire is to see
as much as possible of what may lie beneath.
So the prospector in search of fossils betakes
himself to some region where the ceaseless
warfare waged by water against the dry land
has seamed the face of the earth with countless
gullies and canyons, or carved it into slopes
and bluffs in which the edges of the bone-bearing
strata are exposed to view, and along
these he skirts, ever on the look-out for some
projecting bit of bone. The country is an
almost shadeless desert, burning hot by day,
uncomfortably cool at night. Water is scarce,
and when it can be found, often has little to
commend it save wetness; but the collector is
buoyed up through all this with the hope that
he may discover some creature new to science
that shall not only be bigger and uglier and
stranger than any heretofore found, but shall
be the long-sought form needed for the solution
of some difficult problem in the history
of the past.

Now collecting is a lottery, differing from
most lotteries, however, in that while some of
the returns may be pretty small, there are few[114]
absolute blanks and some remarkably large
prizes, and every collector hopes that it may
fall to his lot to win one of these, and is willing
to work long and arduously for the chance of
obtaining it.

It may give some idea of the chances to say
that some years ago Dr. Wortman spent almost
an entire season in the field without success,
and then, at the eleventh hour, found the
now famous skeleton of Phenacodus, or that a
party from Princeton actually camped within
100 yards of a rich deposit of rare fossils and
yet failed to discover it.

Let us, however, suppose that the reconnaissance
has been successful, and that an outcrop
of bone has been found, serving like a tombstone
carven with strange characters to indicate
the burial-place of some primeval monster.
Possibly Nature long ago rifled the grave, washing
away much of the skeleton, and leaving
little save the fragments visible on the surface;
on the other hand, these pieces may form part
of a complete skeleton, and there is no way to
decide this important question save by actual
excavation. The manner of disinterment varies,[115]
but much depends on whether the fossil
lies in comparatively loose shale or is imbedded
in the solid rock, whether the strata are level
or dip downward into the hillside. If, unfortunately,
this last is the case, it necessitates a
careful shoring up of the excavation with props
of cotton-wood or such boards as may have
been brought along to box specimens, or it may
even be necessary to run a short tunnel in order
to get at some coveted bone. Should the
specimen lie in shale, as is the case with most
of the large reptiles that have been collected,
much of that work may be done with pick and
shovel; but if it is desirable or necessary to
work in firm rock, drills and hammers, wedges,
even powder, may be needed to rend from Nature
her long-kept secrets. In any event, a
detailed plan is made of the excavation, and
each piece of bone or section of rock duly recorded
therein by letter and number, so that
later on the relation of the parts to one another
may be known, or the various sections assembled
in the work-room exactly as they lay
in the quarry. Bones which lie in loose rock
are often, one might say usually, more or less[116]
broken, and when a bone three, four, or even
six feet long, weighing anywhere from 100 to
1,000 pounds, has been shattered to fragments
the problem of removing it is no easy one.
But here the skill of the collector comes into
play to treat the fossil as a surgeon treats a
fractured limb, to cover it with plaster bandages,
and brace it with splints of wood or iron
so that the specimen may not only be taken
from the ground but endure in safety the coming
journey of a thousand or more miles. For
simpler cases or lighter objects strips of sacking,
or even paper, applied with flour and water,
suffice, or pieces of sacking soaked in thin plaster
may be laid over the bone, first covering it
with thin paper in order that the plaster jacket
may simply stiffen and not adhere to it. Collecting
has not always been carried on in this
systematic manner, for the development of the
present methods has been the result of years of
experience; formerly there was a mere skimming-over
of the surface in what Professor
Marsh used to term the potato-gathering style,
but now the effort is made to remove specimens
intact, often imbedded in large masses[117]
of rock, in order that all parts may be preserved.

We will take it for granted that our specimens
have safely passed through all perils by
land and water, road and rail; that they have
been quarried, boxed, carted over a roadless
country to the nearest railway, and have withstood
2,000 miles of jolting in a freight-car.
The first step in reconstruction has been taken;
the problem, now that the boxes are reposing
on the work-room floor, is to make the blocks
of stone give up the secrets they have guarded
for ages, to free the bones from their enveloping
matrix in order that they may tell us
something of the life of the past. The method
of doing this varies with the conditions under
which the material has been gathered, and if
from hard clay, chalk, or shale, the process,
though tedious enough at best, is by no means
so difficult as if the specimens are imbedded
in solid rock. In this case the fragments
from a given section of quarry must be assembled
according to the plan which has been
carefully made as the work of exhumation
progressed, all pieces containing bone must be[118]
stuck together, and weak parts strengthened
with gum or glue. Now the mass is attacked
with hammer and chisel, and the surrounding
matrix slowly and carefully cut away until the
contained bone is revealed, a process much
simpler and more expeditious in the telling
than in the actuality; for the preparator may
not use the heavy tools of the ordinary stone-cutter:
sometimes an awl, or even a glover's
needle, must suffice him, and the chips cut off
are so small and such care must be taken not
to injure the bone that the work is really tedious.
This may, perhaps, be better appreciated
by saying that to clean a single vertebra
of such a huge Dinosaur as Diplodocus may
require a month of continuous labor, and that
a score of these big and complicated bones,
besides others of simpler structure, are included
in the backbone. The finished specimen
weighs over 120 pounds, while as originally
collected, with all the adherent rock, the
weight was twice or thrice as great. Such a
mass as this is comparatively small, and sometimes
huge blocks are taken containing entire
skulls or a number of bones, and not infrequently[119]
weighing a ton. The largest single
specimen is a skull of Triceratops, collected
by Mr. J. B. Hatcher, which weighed, when
boxed, 3,650 pounds.

Or, as the result of some mishap, or through
the work of an inexperienced collector, a valuable
specimen may arrive in the shape of a
box full of irregular fragments of stone compared
with which a dissected map or an old-fashioned
Chinese puzzle is simplicity itself,
and one may spend hours looking for some
piece whose proper location gives the clew to
an entire section, and days, even, may be consumed
before the task is completed. While
this not only tries the patience, but the eyes
as well, there is, nevertheless, a fascination
about this work of fashioning a bone out of
scores, possibly hundreds, of fragments, and
watching the irregular bits of stone shaping
themselves into a mosaic that forms a portion
of some creature, possibly quite new to science,
and destined to bear a name as long as
itself. And thus, after many days of toil, the
bone that millions of years before sank into
the mud of some old lake-bottom or was[120]
buried in the sandy shoals of an ancient river,
is brought to light once more to help tell the
tale of the creatures of the past.

One bone might convey a great deal of information;
on the other hand it might reveal
very little; for, while it is very painful to say
so, the popular impression that it is possible to
reconstruct an animal from a single bone, or
tell its size and habits from a tooth is but
partially correct, and sometimes "the eminent
scientist" has come to grief even with a great
many bones at his disposal. Did not one of
the ablest anatomists describe and figure the
hip-bones of a Dinosaur as its shoulder-blade,
and another, equally able, reconstruct a reptile
"hind side before," placing the head on the
tail! This certainly sounds absurd enough;
but just as absurd mistakes are made by men
in other walks of life, often with far more deplorable
results.

Before passing to the restoration of the exterior
of animals it may be well to say something
of the manner in which the skeleton of
an extinct animal may be reconstructed and
the meaning of its various parts interpreted.[121]
For the adjustment of the muscles is dependent
on the structure of the skeleton, and putting
on the muscles means blocking out the
form, details of external appearance being supplied
by the skin and its accessories of hair,
scales, or horns. Let us suppose in the present
instance that we are dealing with one of the
great reptiles known as Triceratops whose remains
are among the treasures of the National
Museum at Washington, for the reconstruction
of the big beast well illustrates the methods
of the palæontologist and also the troubles
by which he is beset. Moreover, this is not a
purely imaginary case, but one that is very
real, for the skeleton of this animal which was
shown at Buffalo was restored in papier-maché
in exactly the manner indicated. We have a
goodly number of bones, but by no means an
entire skeleton, and yet we wish to complete
the skeleton and incidentally to form some
idea of the creature's habits. Now we can interpret
the past only by a knowledge of the
present, and it is by carefully studying the
skeletons of the animals of to-day that we can
learn to read the meaning of the symbols of[122]
bones left by the animals of a million yesterdays.
Thus we find that certain characters
distinguish the bone of a mammal from that
of a bird, a reptile, or a fish, and these in turn
from one another, and this constitutes the
A B C of comparative anatomy. And, in a
like manner, the bones of the various divisions
of these main groups have to a greater or less
extent their own distinguishing characteristics,
so that by first comparing the bones of extinct
animals with those of creatures that are now
living we are enabled to recognize their nearest
existing relative, and then by comparing them
with one another we learn the relations they
bore in the ancient world. But it must be
borne in mind that some of the early beasts
were so very different from those of to-day
that until pretty much their entire structure
was known there was nothing with which to
compare odd bones. Had but a single incomplete
specimen of Triceratops come to light
we should be very much in the dark concerning
him; and although remains of some thirty
individuals have been discovered, these have
been so imperfect that we are very far from[123]
having all the information we need. A great
part of the head, with its formidable looking
horns, is present, and although the nose is
gone, we know from other specimens that it,
too, was armed with a knob, or horn, and that
the skull ended in a beak, something like that
of a snapping turtle, though formed by a separate
and extra bone; similarly the end of the
lower jaw is lacking, but we may be pretty
certain that it ended in a beak, to match that
of the skull. The large leg-bones of our specimen
are mostly represented, for these being
among the more solid parts of the skeleton
are more frequently preserved than any others,
and though some are from one side and some
from another, this matters not. If the hind
legs were disproportionately long it would indicate
that our animal often or habitually
walked erect, but as there is only difference
enough between the fore and hind limbs to
enable Triceratops to browse comfortably from
the ground we would naturally place him on
all fours, even were the skull not so large as to
make the creature too top-heavy for any other
mode of locomotion. Were the limbs very[124]
small in comparison with the other bones, it
would obviously mean that their owner passed
his life in the water. For a skeleton has a twofold
meaning, it is the best, the most enduring,
testimony we have as to an animal's place in
nature and the relationships it sustains to the
creatures that lived with it, before it, and after
it. More than this, a skeleton is the solution
of a problem in mechanics, the problem of
carrying a given weight and of adaptation to
a given mode of life. Thus the skeleton varies
according as a creature dwells on land, in the
water, or in the air, and according as it feeds
on grass or preys upon its fellows.

And so the mechanics of a skeleton afford
us a clew to the habits of the living animal.
Something, too, may be gathered from the
structure of the leg-bones, for solid bones mean
either a sluggish animal or a creature of more
or less aquatic habits, while hollow bones emphatically
declare a land animal, and an active
one at that; and this, in the case of the Dinosaurs,
hints at predatory habits, the ability to
catch and eat their defenceless and more sluggish
brethren. A claw, or, better yet, a tooth,[125]
may confirm or refute this hint; for a blunt claw
could not be used in tearing prey limb from
limb, nor would a double-edged tooth, made
for rending flesh, serve for champing grass.

But few bones of the feet, and especially the
fore feet, are present, these smaller parts of the
skeleton having been washed away before the
ponderous frame was buried in the sand, and
the best that can be done is to follow the law
of probabilities and put three toes on the hind
foot and five on the fore, two of these last
without claws. The single blunt round claw
among our bones shows, as do the teeth, that
Triceratops was herbivorous; it also pointed a
little downward, and this tells that in the living
animal the sole of the foot was a thick, soft
pad, somewhat as it is in the elephant and rhinoceros,
and that the toes were not entirely
free from one another. There are less than a
dozen vertebræ and still fewer ribs, besides
half a barrelful of pieces, from which to reconstruct
a backbone twenty feet long. That the
ribs are part from one side and part from another
matters no more than it did in the case
of the leg-bones; but the backbone presents a[126]
more difficult problem, since the pieces are not
like so many checkers—all made after one pattern—but
each has an individuality of its own.
The total number of vertebræ must be guessed
at (perhaps it would sound better to say estimated,
but it really means the same), and
knowing that some sections are from the front
part of the vertebral column and some from
the back, we must fill in the gaps as best we
may. The ribs offer a little aid in this task,
giving certain details of the vertebræ, while
those in turn tell something about the adjoining
parts of the ribs. We finish our Triceratops
with a tail of moderate length, as indicated
by the rapid taper of the few vertebræ
available, and from these we gather, too, that
in life the tail was round, and not flattened,
and that it neither served for swimming nor
for a balancing pole. And so, little by little,
have been pieced together the fragments from
which we have derived our knowledge of the
past, and thus has the palæontologist read the
riddles of the rocks.

Fig. 26.—Triceratops, He of the Three-horned Face.


From a statuette by Charles R. Knight.

To make these dry bones live again, to
clothe them with flesh and reconstruct the
[127]
creature as he was or may have been in life,
is, to be honest, very largely guesswork,
though to make a guess that shall come anywhere
near the mark not only demands a
thorough knowledge of anatomy—for the
basis of all restoration must be the skeleton—but
calls for more than a passing acquaintance
with the external appearance of living animals.
And while there is nothing in the bones to
tell how an animal is, or was, clad, they will at
least show to what group the creature belonged,
and, that known, there are certain
probabilities in the case. A bird, for example,
would certainly be clad in feathers. Going a
little farther, we might be pretty sure that
the feathers of a water-fowl would be thick
and close; those of strictly terrestrial birds,
such as the ostrich and other flightless forms,
lax and long. These as general propositions;
of course, in special cases, one might easily
come to grief, as in dealing with birds like
penguins, which are particularly adapted for
an aquatic life, and have the feathers highly
modified. These birds depend upon their fat,
and not on their feathers, for warmth, and so
[128]
their feathers have become a sort of cross between
scales and hairs. Hair and fur belong
to mammals only, although these creatures
show much variety in their outer covering.
The thoroughly marine whales have discarded
furs and adopted a smooth and slippery skin,[9]
well adapted to movement through the water,
relying for warmth on a thick undershirt of
blubber. The earless seals that pass much of
their time on the ice have just enough hair
to keep them from absolute contact with it,
warmth again being provided for by blubber.
The fur seals, which for several months in the
year dwell largely on land, have a coat of fur
and hair, although warmth is mostly furnished,
or rather kept in, by fat.

No reptile, therefore, would be covered with
[129]feathers, neither, judging from those we
know to-day, would they be clad in fur or
hair; but, such coverings being barred out,
there remain a great variety of plates and
scales to choose from. Folds and frills, crests
and dewlaps, like beauty, are but skin deep,
and, being thus superficial, ordinarily leave no
trace of their former presence, and in respect
to them the reconstructor must trust to his
imagination, with the law of probabilities as a
check rein to his fancy. This law would tell us
that such ornaments must not be so placed as
to be in the way, and that while there would be
a possibility—one might even say probability—of
the great, short-headed, iguana-like
Dinosaurs having dewlaps, that there would
be no great likelihood of their possessing ruffs
such as that of the Australian Chlamydosaurus
(mantled lizard) to flap about their ears.
Even Stegosaurus, with his bizarre array of
great plates and spines, kept them on his
back, out of the way. Such festal ornamentation
would, however, more likely be found in
small, active creatures, the larger beasts contenting
themselves with plates and folds.

[130]

Spines and plates usually leave some trace
of their existence, for they consist of a super-structure
of skin or horn, built on a foundation
of bone; and while even horn decomposes
too quickly to "petrify," the bone will
become fossilized and changed into enduring
stone. But while this affords a pretty sure
guide to the general shape of the investing
horn, it does not give all the details, and there
may have been ridges and furrows and sculpturing
that we know not of.

Knowing, then, what the probabilities are, we
have some guide to the character of the covering
that should be placed on an animal, and if
we may not be sure as to what should be done,
we may be pretty certain what should not.

For example, to depict a Dinosaur with
smooth, rubbery hide walking about on dry
land would be to violate the probabilities, for
only such exclusively aquatic creatures as the
whales among mammals, and the salamanders
among batrachians, are clothed in smooth,
shiny skin. There might, however, be reason
to suspect that a creature largely aquatic in its
habits did occasionally venture on land, as, for[131]
instance, when vertebræ that seem illy adapted
for carrying the weight of a land animal are
found in company with huge limb-bones and
massive feet we may feel reasonably certain
that their owner passed at least a portion of his
time on terra firma.

So much for the probabilities as to the covering
of animals known to us only by their fossil
remains; but it is often possible to go beyond
this, and to state certainly how they were
clad. For while the chances are small that
any trace of the covering of an extinct animal,
other than bony plates, will be preserved, Nature
does now and then seem to have relented,
and occasionally some animal settled to rest
where it was so quickly and quietly covered
with fine mud that the impression of small
scales, feathers, or even smooth skin, was preserved;
curiously enough, there seems to be
scarcely any record of the imprint of hair.
Then, too, it is to be remembered that while
the chances were very much against such preservation,
in the thousands or millions of times
creatures died the millionth chance might come
uppermost.

[132]

Silhouettes of those marine reptiles, the Ichthyosaurs,
have been found, probably made by
the slow carbonization of animal matter, showing
not only the form of the body and tail, but
revealing the existence of an unsuspected back
fin. And yet these animals were apparently
clad in a skin as thin and smooth as that of a
whale. Impressions of feathers were known
long before the discovery of Archæopteryx; a
few have been found in the Green River and
Florissant shales of Wyoming, and a Hesperornis
in the collection of the State University
of Kansas shows traces of the existence of
long, soft feathers on the legs and very clear
imprints of the scales and reticulated skin that
covered the tarsus. From the Chalk of Kansas,
too, came the example of Tylosaur, showing
that the back of this animal was decorated
with the crest shown in Mr. Knight's restoration,
one not unlike that of the modern iguana.
From the Laramie sandstone of Montana Mr.
Hatcher and Mr. Butler have obtained the impressions
of portions of the skin of the great
Dinosaur, Thespesius, which show that the
covering of this animal consisted largely, if not[133]
entirely, of small, irregularly hexagonal horny
scutes, slightly thickened in the centre. The
quarries of lithographic stone at Solenhofen
have yielded a few specimens of flying reptiles,
pterodactyls, which not only verify the correctness
of the inference that these creatures possessed
membranous wings, like the bats, but
show the exact shape, and it was sometimes
very curious, of this membrane. And each and
all of these wonderfully preserved specimens
serve both to check and guide the restorer
in his task of clothing the animal as it was in
life.

And all this help is needed, for it is an easy
matter to make a wide-sweeping deduction,
apparently resting on a good basis of fact, and
yet erroneous. Remains of the Mammoth
and Woolly Rhinoceros, found in Siberia and
Northern Europe, were thought to indicate
that at the period when these animals lived
the climate was mild, a very natural inference,
since the elephants and rhinoceroses we now
know are all inhabitants of tropical climes.
But the discovery of more or less complete
specimens makes it evident that the climate[134]
was not particularly mild; the animals were
simply adapted to it; instead of being naked
like their modern relatives, they were dressed
for the climate in a woolly covering. We
think of the tiger as prowling through the
jungles of India, but he ranges so far north
that in some localities this beast preys upon
reindeer, which are among the most northern
of large mammals, and there the tiger is clad
in fairly thick fur.

When we come to coloring a reconstructed
animal we have absolutely no guide, unless we
assume that the larger a creature the more soberly
will it be colored. The great land animals
of to-day, the elephant and rhinoceros, to
say nothing of the aquatic hippopotamus, are
very dully colored, and while this sombre coloration
is to-day a protection, rendering these
animals less easily seen by man than they
otherwise would be, yet at the time this color
was developing man was not nor were there
enemies sufficiently formidable to menace the
race of elephantine creatures.

For where mere size furnishes sufficient protection
one would hardly expect to find protective[135]
coloration as well, unless indeed a
creature preyed upon others, when it might be
advantageous to enable a predatory animal to
steal upon its prey.

Color often exists (or is supposed to) as a
sexual characteristic, to render the male of a
species attractive to, or readily recognizable
by, the female, but in the case of large animals
mere size is quite enough to render them conspicuous,
and possibly this may be one of the
factors in the dull coloration of large animals.

So while a green and yellow Triceratops
would undoubtedly have been a conspicuous
feature in the Cretaceous landscape, from what
we know of existing animals it seems best to
curb our fancy and, so far as large Dinosaurs
are concerned, employ the colors of a Rembrandt
rather than those of a sign painter.

Aids, or at least hints, to the coloration of
extinct animals are to be found in the coloration
of the young of various living species, for
as the changes undergone by the embryo are
in a measure an epitome of the changes undergone
by a species during its evolution, so the
brief color phases or markings of the young[136]
are considered to represent the ordinary coloring
of distant ancestors. Young thrushes are
spotted, young ostriches and grebes are irregularly
striped, young lions are spotted, and in
restoring the early horse, or Hyracothere, Professor
Osborn had the animal represented as
faintly striped, for the reason that zebras, the
wild horses of to-day, are striped, and because
the ass, which is a primitive type of horse, is
striped over the shoulders, these being hints
that the earlier horse-like forms were also
striped.

Thus just as the skeleton of a Dinosaur may
be a composite structure, made up of the
bones of a dozen individuals, and these in turn
mosaics of many fragments, so may the semblance
of the living animal be based on a fact,
pieced out with a probability and completed
by a bit of theory.

REFERENCES

There is a large series of restorations of extinct animals,
prepared by Mr. Charles R. Knight, under the
direction of Professor Osborn, in the Hall of Palæontology
of the American Museum of Natural History,[137]
and these are later to be reproduced and issued in portfolio
form.

Should the reader visit Princeton, he may see in the
museum there a number of B. Waterhouse Hawkins's
creations—creations is the proper word—which are of
interest as examples of the early work in this line.

The "Report of the Smithsonian Institution for
1900" contains an article on "The Restoration of
Extinct Animals," pages 479-492, which includes a
number of plates showing the progress that has been
made in this direction.

Fig. 27.—A Hint of Buried Treasures.

[138]

VIII

FEATHERED GIANTS

Nearly every group of animals has its giants,
its species which tower above their fellows as
Goliath of Gath stood head and shoulders
above the Philistine hosts; and while some of
these are giants only in comparison with their
fellows, belonging to families whose members
are short of stature, others are sufficiently
great to be called giants under any circumstances.
Some of these giants live to-day,
some have but recently passed away, and some
ceased to be long ages before man trod this
earth. The most gigantic of mammals—the
whales—still survive, and the elephant of to-day
suffers but little in comparison with the
mammoth of yesterday; the monstrous Dinosaurs,
greatest of all reptiles—greatest, in
fact, of all animals that have walked the[139]
earth—flourished thousands upon thousands
of years ago. As for birds, some of the giants
among them are still living, some existed long
geologic periods ago, and a few have so recently
vanished from the scene that their
memory still lingers amid the haze of tradition.
The best known among these, as well as the
most recent in point of time, are the Moas of
New Zealand, first brought to notice by the
Rev. W. Colenso, later on Bishop of New
Zealand, one of the many missionaries to
whom Science is under obligations. Early in
1838, Bishop Colenso, while on a missionary
visit to the East Cape region, heard from the
natives of Waiapu tales of a monstrous bird,
called Moa, having the head of a man, that
inhabited the mountain-side some eighty miles
away. This mighty bird, the last of his race,
was said to be attended by two equally huge
lizards that kept guard while he slept, and on
the approach of man wakened the Moa, who
immediately rushed upon the intruders and
trampled them to death. None of the Maoris
had seen this bird, but they had seen and
somewhat irreverently used for making parts[140]
of their fishing tackle, bones of its extinct relatives,
and these bones they declared to be as
large as those of an ox.

About the same time another missionary,
the Rev. Richard Taylor, found a bone ascribed
to the Moa, and met with a very similar tradition
among the natives of a near-by district,
only, as the foot of the rainbow moves away
as we move toward it, in his case the bird was
said to dwell in quite a different locality from
that given by the natives of East Cape. While,
however, the Maoris were certain that the
Moa still lived, and to doubt its existence was
little short of a crime, no one had actually seen
it, and as time went on and the bird still remained
unseen by any explorer, hope became
doubt and doubt certainty, until it even became
a mooted question whether such a bird
had existed within the past ten centuries, to
say nothing of having lived within the memory
of man.

But if we do not know the living birds, their
remains are scattered broadcast over hillside
and plain, concealed in caves, buried in the
mud of swamps, and from these we gain a good
[141]
idea of their size and structure, while chance
has even made it possible to know something
of their color and general appearance. This
chance was the discovery of a few specimens,
preserved in exceptionally dry caves on the
South Island, which not only had some of the
bones still united by ligaments, but patches of
skin clinging to the bones, and bearing numerous
feathers of a chestnut color tipped with
white. These small, straggling, rusty feathers
are not much to look at, but when we reflect
that they have been preserved for centuries
without any care whatever, while the buffalo
bugs have devoured our best Smyrna rugs in
spite of all possible precautions, our respect for
them increases.

Fig. 28.—Relics of the Moa.

From the bones we learn that there were a
great many kinds of Moas, twenty at least,
ranging in size from those little larger than a
turkey to that giant among giants, Dinornis
maximus, which stood at least ten feet high,[10]
[142]
or two feet higher than the largest ostrich, and
may well claim the distinction of being the
tallest of all known birds. We also learn from
the bones that not only were the Moas flightless,
but that many of them were absolutely
wingless, being devoid even of such vestiges of
wings as we find in the Cassowary or Apteryx.
But if Nature deprived these birds of wings,
she made ample amends in the matter of legs,
those of some species, the Elephant-footed
Moa, Pachyornis elephantopus, for example,
being so massively built as to cause one to
wonder what the owner used them for, although
the generally accepted theory is that
they were used for scratching up the roots of
ferns on which the Moas are believed to have
fed. And if a blow from an irate ostrich is
sufficient to fell a man, what must have been
the kicking power of an able-bodied Moa?
Beside this bird the ostrich would appear as
slim and graceful as a gazelle beside a prize ox.

The Moas were confined to New Zealand,
some species inhabiting the North Island, some
the South, very few being common to both,
and from these peculiarities of distribution[143]
geologists deduce that at some early period in
the history of the earth the two islands formed
one, that later on the land subsided, leaving
the islands separated by a strait, and that since
this subsidence there has been sufficient time
for the development of the species peculiar to
each island. Although Moas were still numerous
when man made his appearance in this
part of the world, the large deposits of their
bones indicate that they were on the wane, and
that natural causes had already reduced the
feathered population of these islands. A glacial
period is believed to have wrought their
destruction, and in one great morass, abounding
in springs, their bones occur in such enormous
numbers, layer upon layer, that it is
thought the birds sought the place where the
flowing springs might afford their feet at least
some respite from the biting cold, and there
perished miserably by thousands.

What Nature spared man finished, and
legends of Moa hunts and Moa feasts still lingered
among the Maoris when the white man
came and began in turn the extermination of
the Maori. The theory has been advanced,[144]
with much to support it, that the big birds
were eaten off the face of the earth by an earlier
race than the Maoris, and that after the
extirpation of the Moas the craving for flesh
naturally led to cannibalism. But by whomsoever
the destruction was wrought, the result
was the same, the habitat of these feathered
giants knew them no longer, while multitudes
of charred bones, interspersed with fragments
of egg-shells, bear testimony to former barbaric
feasts.

It is a far cry from New Zealand to Madagascar,
but thither must we go, for that island
was, pity we cannot say is, inhabited by a
race of giant birds from whose eggs it has been
thought may have been hatched the Roc of
Sindbad. Arabian tales, as we all know, locate
the Roc either in Madagascar or in some
adjacent island to the north and east, and it is
far from unlikely that legends of the Æpyornis,
backed by the substantial proof of its
enormous eggs, may have been the slight
foundation of fact whereon the story-teller
erected his structure of fiction. True, the Roc
of fable was a gigantic bird of prey capable of[145]
bearing away an elephant in its talons, while
the Æpyornis has shed its wings and shrunk
to dimensions little larger than an ostrich, but
this is the inevitable result of closer acquaintance
and the application of a two-foot rule.

Like the Moa the Æpyornis seems to have
lived in tradition long after it became extinct,
for a French history of Madagascar, published
as early as 1658 makes mention of a large bird,
or kind of ostrich, said to inhabit the southern
end of the island. Still, in spite of bones having
been found that bear evident traces of the
handiwork of man, it is possible that this and
other reports were due to the obvious necessity
of having some bird to account for the presence
of the eggs.

The actual introduction of the Æpyornis to
science took place in 1834, when a French
traveller sent Jules Verreaux, the ornithologist,
a sketch of a huge egg, saying that he had
seen two of that size, one sawed in twain to
make bowls, the other, traversed by a stick,
serving in the preparation of rice uses somewhat
in contrast with the proverbial fragility
of egg-shells. A little later another traveller[146]
procured some fragments of egg-shells, but it
was not until 1851 that any entire eggs were
obtained, when two were secured, and with a
few bones sent to France, where Geoffroy St.
Hilaire bestowed upon them the name of
Æpyornis maximus (the greatest lofty bird).
Maximus the eggs remain, for they still hold
the record for size; but so far as the bird that
is supposed to have laid them is concerned, the
name was a little premature, for other and
larger species subsequently came to hand.
Between the Æpyornithes and the Moas Science
has had a hard time, for the supply of big
words was not large enough to go around, and
some had to do duty twice. In the way of
generic names we have Dinornis, terrible bird;
Æpyornis, high bird; Pachyornis, stout bird;
and Brontornis, thunder bird, while for specific
names there are robustus, maximus, titan;
gravis, heavy; immanis, enormous; crassus,
stout; ingens, great; and elephantopus, elephant-footed—truly
a goodly array of large-sounding
words. But to return to the big
eggs! Usually we look upon those of the ostrich
as pretty large, but an ostrich egg measures[147]
4-1/2 by 6 inches, while that of the Æpyornis
is 9 by 13 inches; or, to put it another
way, it would hold the contents of six ostrichs'
eggs, or one hundred and forty-eight hens' eggs,
or thirty thousand humming birds' eggs; and
while this is very much smaller than a waterbutt,
it is still as large as a bucket, and one or
two such eggs might suffice to make an omelet
for Gargantua himself.

The size of an egg is no safe criterion of the
size of the bird that laid it, for a large bird
may lay a small egg, or a small bird a large
one. Comparing the egg of the great Moa
with that of our Æpyornis one might think
the latter much the larger bird, say twelve feet
in height, when the facts in the case are that
while there was no great difference in the
weight of the two, that difference, and a superiority
of at least two feet in height, are in
favor of the bird that laid the smaller egg.
The record of large eggs, however, belongs to
the Apteryx, a New Zealand bird smaller
than a hen, though distantly related to the
Moas, which lays an egg about one-third of
its own weight, measuring 3 by 5 inches; perhaps[148]
it is not to be wondered at that the bird
lays but two.

Although most of the eggs of these big
birds that have been found have literally been
unearthed from the muck of swamps, now and
then one comes to light in a more interesting
manner as, for example, when a perfect egg of
Æpyornis was found afloat after a hurricane,
bobbing serenely up and down with the waves
near St. Augustine's Bay, or when an egg of
the Moa was exhumed from an ancient Maori
grave, where for years it had lain unharmed,
safely clasped between the skeleton fingers of
the occupant. So far very few of these huge
eggs have made their way to this country, and
the only egg of Æpyornis now on this side of
the water is the property of a private individual.

Most recent in point of discovery, but oldest
in point of time, are the giant birds from Patagonia,
which are burdened with the name of
Phororhacidæ, a name that originated in an
error, although the error may well be excused.
The first fragment of one of these great birds
to come to light was a portion of the lower
jaw, and this was so massive, so un-bird-like,
[149]
that the finder dubbed it Phororhacos, and so
it must remain.

Fig. 29.—Eggs of Feathered Giants, Æpyornis, Ostrich, Moa, Compared
with a Hen's Egg.

It is a pity that all the large names were
used up before this group of birds was discovered,
and it is particularly unfortunate that
Dinornis, terrible bird, was applied to the root-eating
Moas, for these Patagonian birds, with
their massive limbs, huge heads and hooked
beaks, were truly worthy of such a name; and
although in nowise related to the eagles, they
may in habit have been terrestrial birds of prey.
Not all the members of this family are giants,
for as in other groups, some are big and some
little, but the largest among them might be
styled the Daniel Lambert of the feathered
race. Brontornis, for example, the thunder
bird, or as the irreverent translate it, the thundering
big bird, had leg-bones larger than those
of an ox, the drumstick measuring 30 inches in
length by 2-1/2 inches in diameter, or 4-1/4 inches
across the ends, while the tarsus, or lower bone
of the leg to which the toes are attached, was
16-1/2 inches long and 5-1/2 inches wide where the
toes join on. Bear this in mind the next time
you see a large turkey, or compare these bones
[150]
with those of an ostrich: but lest you may forget,
it may be said that the same bone of a
fourteen-pound turkey is 5-1/2 inches long, and
one inch wide at either end, while that of an
ostrich measures 19 inches long and 2 inches
across the toes, or 3 at the upper end.

If Brontornis was a heavy-limbed bird, he
was not without near rivals among the Moas,
while the great Phororhacos, one of his contemporaries,
was not only nearly as large, but
quite unique in build. Imagine a bird seven
or eight feet in height from the sole of his big,
sharp-clawed feet, to the top of his huge head,
poise this head on a neck as thick as that of a
horse, arm it with a beak as sharp as an icepick
and almost as formidable, and you have a
fair idea of this feathered giant of the ancient
pampas. The head indeed was truly colossal
for that of a bird, measuring 23 inches in
length by 7 in depth, while that of the racehorse
Lexington, and he was a good-sized
horse, measures 22 inches long by 5-1/2 inches
deep. The depth of the jaw is omitted because
we wish to make as good a case as possible
for the bird, and the jaw of a horse is so[151]
deep as to give him an undue advantage in that
respect.

Fig. 30.—Skull of Phororhacos Compared with that of
the Race-horse Lexington.

We can only speculate on the food of these
great birds, and for aught we know to the
contrary they may have caught fish, fed upon
carrion, or used their powerful feet and huge
beaks for grubbing roots; but if they were not
more or less carnivorous, preying upon such
reptiles, mammals and other birds as came
within reach, then nature apparently made a
mistake in giving them such a formidable
equipment of beak and claw. So far as habits[152]
go we might be
justified in calling
them cursorial
birds of prey.

Fig. 31.—Leg of a Horse Compared
with that of the Giant Moa.

We really know
very little about
these Patagonian
giants, but they
are interesting not
only from their
great size and astounding
skulls,
but because of the
early age (Miocene)
at which
they lived and because
in spite of
their bulk they are
in nowise related
to the ostriches,
but belong near
the heron family.
As usual, we have
no idea why they
became extinct,[153]
but in this instance man is guiltless, for they
lived and died long before he made his appearance,
and the ever-convenient hypothesis
"change of climate" may be responsible for
their disappearance.

Something, perhaps, remains to be said concerning
the causes which seem to have led to
the development of these giant birds, as well
as the reasons for their flightless condition and
peculiar distribution, for it will be noticed
that, with the exception of the African and
South American ostriches the great flightless
birds as a rule are, and were, confined to uninhabited
or sparsely populated islands, and this
is equally true of the many small, but equally
flightless birds. It is a seemingly harsh law
of nature that all living beings shall live in a
more or less active struggle with each other
and with their surroundings, and that those
creatures which possess some slight advantage
over their fellows in the matter of speed, or
strength, or ability to adapt themselves to surrounding
conditions, shall prosper at the expense
of the others. In the power of flight,
birds have a great safeguard against changes of[154]
climate with their accompanying variations in
the supply of food, and, to a lesser extent,
against their various enemies, including man.
This power of flight, acquired early in their
geological history, has enabled birds to spread
over the length and breadth of the globe as no
other group of animals has done, and to thrive
under the most varying conditions, and it
would seem that if this power were lost it
must sooner or later work harm. Now to-day
we find no great wingless birds in thickly
populated regions, or where beasts of prey
abound; the ostriches roam the desert wastes
of Arabia, Africa and South America where
men are few and savage beasts scarce, and
against these is placed a fleetness of foot inherited
from ancestors who acquired it before
man was. The heavy cassowaries dwell in the
thinly inhabited, thickly wooded islands of
Malaysia, where again there are no large carnivores
and where the dense vegetation is some
safeguard against man; the emu comes from
the Australian plains, where also there are no
four-footed enemies[11] and where his ancestors
[155]dwelt in peace before the advent of man.
And the same things are true of the Moas, the
Æpyornithes, the flightless birds of Patagonia,
the recent dodo of Mauritius and the solitaire
of Rodriguez, each and all of which flourished
in places where there were no men and practically
no other enemies. Hence we deduce
that absence of enemies is the prime factor in
the existence of flightless birds,[12] although
presence of food is an essential, while isolation,
or restriction to a limited area, plays an important
part by keeping together those birds,
or that race of birds, whose members show a
tendency to disuse their wings. It will be
seen that such combinations of circumstances
will most naturally be found on islands whose
geological history is such that they have had
no connection with adjacent continents, or
such a very ancient connection that they were
not then peopled with beasts of prey, while
subsequently their distance from other countries
has prevented them from receiving such
[156]population by accident in recent times and has
also retarded the arrival of man.

Once established, flightlessness and size play
into one another's hands; the flightless bird
has no limit placed on its size[13] while granted
a food supply and immunity from man; the
larger the bird the less the necessity for wings
to escape from four-footed foes. So long as
the climate was favorable and man absent, the
big, clumsy bird might thrive, but upon the
coming of man, or in the face of any unfavorable
change of climate, he would be at a serious
disadvantage and hence whenever either
of these two factors has been brought to bear
against them the feathered giants have vanished.

REFERENCES

There is a fine collection of mounted skeletons of various
species of Moas in the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Cambridge, Mass., and another in the American
Museum of Natural History, New York. A few
[157]
other skeletons and numerous bones are to be found in
other institutions, but the author is not aware of any egg
being in this country. Specimens of the Æpyornis are
rare in this country, but Mr. Robert Gilfort, of Orange,
N.J., is the possessor of a very fine egg. A number of
eggs have been sold in London, the prices ranging from
£200 down to £42, this last being much less than prices
paid for eggs of the great auk. But then, the great
auk is somewhat of a fad, and there are just enough
eggs in existence to bring one into the market every
little while. Besides, the number of eggs of the great
auk is a fixed quantity, while no one knows how many
more of Æpyornis remain to be discovered in the swamps
of Madagascar. No specimens of the gigantic Patagonian
birds are now in this country, but a fine example
of one of the smaller forms, Pelycornis, including
the only breast-bone yet found, is in the Museum of
Princeton University.

The largest known tibia of a Moa, the longest bird-bone
known, is in the collection of the Canterbury Museum,
Christchurch, New Zealand; it is 3 feet 3 inches
long. This, however, is exceptional, the measurements
of the leg-bones of an ordinary Dinornis maximus
being as follows: Femur, 18 inches; tibia, 32 inches;
tarsus, 19 inches, a total of 5 feet 9 inches. The egg
measures 10-1/2 by 6-1/2 inches.

There is plenty of literature, and very interesting[158]
literature, about the Moas, but, unfortunately, the best
of it is not always accessible, being contained in the
"New Zealand Journal of Science" and the "Transactions
of the New Zealand Institute." The volume of
"Transactions" for 1893, being vol. xxvi., contains a
very full list of articles relating to the Moas, compiled
by Mr. A. Hamilton; it will be found to commence on
page 229. There is a good article on Moa in Newton's
"Dictionary of Birds," a book that should be in every
library.

Fig. 32.—The Three Giants, Phororhacos, Moa, Ostrich.

[159]

IX

THE ANCESTRY OF THE HORSE

The American whose ancestors came over in
the "Mayflower" has a proper pride in the
length of the line of his descent. The Englishman
whose genealogical tree sprang up at the
time of William the Conqueror has, in its eight
centuries of growth, still larger occasion for
pluming himself on the antiquity of his family.
But the pedigree of even the latter is a thing
of yesterday when compared with that of the
horse, whose family records, according to Professor
Osborn, reach backward for something
like 2,000,000 years. And if, as we have been
told, "it is a good thing to have ancestors, but
sometimes a little hard on the ancestor," in this[160]
instance at least the founders of the family
have every reason to regard their descendants
with undisguised pride. For the horse family
started in life in a small way, and the first of
the line, the Hyracotherium, was "a little animal
no bigger than a fox, and on five[14] toes
he scampered over Tertiary rocks," in the age
called Eocene, because it was the morning of
life for the great group of mammals whose culminating
point was man. At that time, western
North America was a country of many
lakes, for the most part comparatively shallow,
around the reedy margins of which moved a
host of animals, quite unlike those of to-day,
and yet foreshadowing them, the forerunners
of the rhinoceros, tapir, and the horse.

The early horse—we may call him so by
courtesy, although he was then very far from
being a true horse—was an insignificant little
creature, apparently far less likely to succeed
in life's race than his bulky competitors, and
yet, by making the most of their opportunities,
[161]his descendants have survived, while most of
theirs have dropped by the wayside; and
finally, by the aid of man, the horse has become
spread over the length and breadth of
the habitable globe.

Fig. 33.—Skeleton of the Modern Horse and of His
Eocene Ancestor.

Now right here it may be asked, How do
we know that the little Hyracothere was the[162]
progenitor of the horse, and how can it be
shown that there is any bond of kinship between
him and, for example, the great French
Percheron? There is only one way in which
we can obtain this knowledge, and but one
method by which the relationship can be
shown, and that is by collecting the fossil remains
of animals long extinct and comparing
them with the bones of the recent horse, a
branch of science known as Palæontology. It
has taken a very long time to gather the necessary
evidence, and it has taken a vast amount
of hard work in our western Territories, for
"the country that is as hot as Hades, watered
by stagnant alkali pools, is almost invariably
the richest in fossils." Likewise it has called
for the expenditure of much time and more patience
to put together some of this petrified
evidence, fragmentary in every sense of the
word, and get it into such shape that it could
be handled by the anatomist. Still, the work
has been done, and, link by link, the chain has
been constructed that unites the horse of to-day
with the horse of very many yesterdays.

The very first links in this chain are the remains[163]
of the bronze age and those found among
the ruins of the ancient Swiss lake dwellings;
but earlier still than these are the bones
of horses found abundantly in northern Europe,
Asia, and America. The individual bones and
teeth of some of these horses are scarcely distinguishable
from those of to-day, a fact noted
in the name, Equus fraternus, applied to one
species; and when teeth alone are found, it is
at times practically impossible to say whether
they belong to a fossil horse or to a modern
animal. But when enough scattered bones are
gathered to make a fairly complete skeleton, it
becomes evident that the fossil horse had a proportionately
larger head and smaller feet than
his existing relative, and that he was a little
more like an ass or zebra, for the latter, spite
of his gay coat, is a near relative of the lowly
ass. Moreover, primitive man made sketches
of the primitive horse, just as he did of the
mammoth, and these indicate that the horse of
those days was something like an overgrown
Shetland pony, low and heavily built, large-headed
and rough-coated. For the old cave-dwellers
of Europe were intimately acquainted[164]
with the prehistoric horses, using them for
food, as they did almost every animal that fell
beneath their flint arrows and stone axes. And
if one may judge from the abundance of bones,
the horses must have roamed about in bands,
just as the horses escaped from civilization
roam, or have roamed, over the pampas of
South America and the prairies of the West.

The horse was just as abundant in North
America in Pleistocene time as in Europe;
but there is no evidence to show that it was
contemporary with early man in North America,
and, even were this the case, it is generally
believed that long before the discovery of
America the horse had disappeared. And yet,
so plentiful and so fresh are his remains, and
so much like those of the mustang, that the
late Professor Cope was wont to say that it
almost seemed as if the horse might have
lingered in Texas until the coming of the white
man. And Sir William Flower wrote: "There
is a possibility of the animal having still existed,
in a wild state, in some parts of the continent
remote from that which was first visited
by the Spaniards, where they were certainly[165]
unknown. It has been suggested that the
horses which were found by Cabot in La Plata
in 1530 cannot have been introduced."

Still we have not the least little bit of positive
proof that such was the case, and although
the site of many an ancient Indian village has
been carefully explored, no bones of the horse
have come to light, or if they have been found,
bones of the ox or sheep were also present to
tell that the village was occupied long after
the advent of the whites. It is also a curious
fact that within historic times there have been
no wild horses, in the true sense of the word,
unless indeed those found on the steppes north
of the Sea of Azof be wild, and this is very
doubtful. But long before the dawn of history
the horse was domesticated in Europe, and
Cæsar found the Germans, and even the old
Britons, using war chariots drawn by horses—for
the first use man seems to have made of
the horse was to aid him in killing off his fellow-man,
and not until comparatively modern
times was the animal employed in the peaceful
arts of agriculture. The immediate predecessors
of these horses were considerably[166]
smaller, being about the size and build of a
pony, but they were very much like a horse in
structure, save that the teeth were shorter.
As they lived during Pliocene times, they have
been named "Pliohippus."

Going back into the past a step farther,
though a pretty long step if we reckon by
years, we come upon a number of animals very
much like horses, save for certain cranial peculiarities
and the fact that they had three
toes on each foot, while the horse, as every one
knows, has but one toe. Now, if we glance at
the skeleton of a horse, we will see on either
side of the canon-bone, in the same situation
as the upper part of the little toes of the Hippotherium,
as these three-toed horses are called,
a long slender bone, termed by veterinarians
the splint bone; and it requires no anatomical
training to see that the bones in the two animals
are the same. The horse lacks the lower
part of his side toes, that is all, just as man
will very probably some day lack the last bones
of his little toe. We find an approach to this
condition in some of the Hippotheres even,
known as Protohippus, in which the side toes[167]
are quite small, foreshadowing the time when
they shall have disappeared entirely. It may
also be noted here that the splint bones of the
horses of the bronze age are a little longer than
those of existing horses, and that they are
never united with the large central toe, while
nowadays there is something of a tendency for
the three bones to fuse into one, although part
of this tendency the writer believes to be due
to inflammation set up by the strain of the
pulling and hauling the animal is now called
upon to do. Some of these three-toed Hippotheres
are not in the direct line of ancestry of
the horse, but are side branches on the family
tree, having become so highly specialized in
certain directions that no further progress
horseward was possible.

Backward still, and the bones we find in the
Miocene strata of the West, belonging to those
ancestors of the horse to which the name of
Mesohippus has been given because they are
midway in time and structure between the
horse of the past and present, tell us that
then all horses were small and that all had
three toes on a foot, while the fore feet bore[168]
even the suggestion of a fourth toe. From
this to our Eocene Hyracothere with four toes
is only another long-time step. We may go
even beyond this in time and structure, and
carry back the line of the horse to animals
which only remotely resembled him and had
five good toes to a foot; but while these contained
the possibility of a horse, they made no
show of it.

Fig. 34.—The Development of the Horse.

Increase in size and decrease in number of[169]
the toes were not the only changes that were
required to transform the progeny of the Hyracothere
into a horse. These are the most
evident; but the increased complexity in the
structure of the teeth was quite as important.
The teeth of gnawing animals have often been
compared to a chisel which is made of a steel
plate with soft iron backing, and the teeth of
a horse, or of other grass-eating animals, are
simply an elaboration of this idea. The hard[170]
enamel, which represents the steel, is set in
soft dentine, which represents the iron, and in
use the dentine wears away the faster of the
two, so that the enamel stands up in ridges,
each tooth becoming, as it is correctly termed,
"a grinder." In a horse the plates of enamel
form curved, complex, irregular patterns; but
as we go back in time, the patterns become
less and less elaborate, until in the Hyracothere,
standing at the foot of the family tree,
the teeth are very simple in structure. Moreover,
his teeth were of limited growth, while
those of the horse grow for a considerable
time, thus compensating for the wear to which
they are subjected.

We have, then, this direct evidence as to
the genealogy of the horse, that between the
little Eocene Hyracothere and the modern
horse we can place a series of animals by
which we can pass by gradual stages from one
to the other, and that as we come upward
there is an increase in stature, in the complexity
of the teeth, and in the size of the
brain. At the same time, the number of toes
decreases, which tells that the animals were[171]
developing more and more speed; for it is a
rule that the fewer the toes the faster the animal:
the fastest of birds, the ostrich, has but
two toes, and one of these is mostly ornamental;
and the fastest of mammals, the horse,
has but one.

All breeders of fancy stock, particularly of
pigeons and poultry, recognize the tendency
of animals to revert to the forms whence they
were derived and reproduce some character of
a distant ancestor; to "throw back," as the
breeders term it. If now, instead of reproducing
a trait or feature possessed by some
ancestor a score, a hundred, or perhaps a thousand
years ago, there should reappear a characteristic
of some ancestor that flourished
100,000 years back, we should have a seeming
abnormality, but really a case of reversion;
and the more we become acquainted with the
structure of extinct animals and the development
of those now living, the better able are
we to explain these apparent abnormalities.

Bearing in mind that the two splint bones
of the horse correspond to the upper portions
of the side toes of the Hippotherium and[172]
Mesohippus, it is easy to see that if for any
reason these should develop into toes, they
would make the foot of a modern horse appear
like that of his distant ancestor. While such
a thing rarely happens, yet now and then nature
apparently does attempt to reproduce a
horse's foot after the ancient pattern, for occasionally
we meet with a horse having, instead
of the single toe with which the average horse
is satisfied, one or possibly two extra toes.
Sometimes the toe is extra in every sense of
the word, being a mere duplication of the central
toe; but sometimes it is an actual development
of one of the splint bones. No less a
personage than Julius Cæsar possessed one of
these polydactyl horses, and the reporters of
the Daily Roman and the Tiberian Gazette
doubtless wrote it up in good journalistic
Latin, for we find the horse described as having
feet that were almost human, and as being
looked upon with great awe. While this is
the most celebrated of extra-toed horses, other
and more plebeian individuals have been much
more widely known through having been exhibited
throughout the country under such[173]
titles as "Clique, the horse with six feet,"
"the eight-footed Cuban horse," and so on;
and possibly some of these are familiar to
readers of this page.

So the collateral evidence, though scanty,
bears out the circumstantial proof, derived
from fossil bones, that the horse has developed
from a many-toed ancestor; and the evidence
points toward the little Hyracothere as being
that ancestor. It remains only to show some
good reason why this development should
have taken place, or to indicate the forces by
which it was brought about. We have heard
much about "the survival of the fittest," a
phrase which simply means that those animals
best adapted to their surroundings will survive,
while those ill adapted will perish. But
it should be added that it means also that the
animals must be able to adapt themselves to
changes in their environment, or to change
with it. Living beings cannot stand still indefinitely;
they must progress or perish. And
this seems to have been the cause for the extinction
of the huge quadrupeds that flourished
at the time of the three-toed Miocene[174]
horse. They were adapted to their environment
as it was; but when the western mountains
were thrust upward, cutting off the
moist winds from the Pacific, making great
changes in the rainfall and climate to the eastward
of the Rocky Mountains, these big
beasts, slow of foot and dull of brain, could
not keep pace with the change, and their race
vanished from the face of the earth. The day
of the little Hyracothere was at the beginning
of the great series of changes by which the
lake country of the West, with its marshy
flats and rank vegetation, became transformed
into dry uplands sparsely clad with fine
grasses. On these dry plains the more nimble-footed
animals would have the advantage in
the struggle for existence; and while the four-toed
foot would keep its owner from sinking
in soft ground, he was handicapped when it
became a question of speed, for not only is a
fleet animal better able to flee from danger
than his slower fellows, but in time of drouth
he can cover the greater extent of territory
in search of food or water. So, too, as the
rank rushes gave place to fine grasses, often[175]
browned and withered beneath the summer's
sun, the complex tooth had an advantage over
that of simpler structure, while the cutting-teeth,
so completely developed in the horse
family, enabled their possessors to crop the
grass as closely as one could do it with scissors.
Likewise, up to a certain point, the
largest, most powerful animal will not only
conquer, or escape from, his enemies, but prevail
over rivals of his own kind as well, and
thus it came to pass that those early members
of the horse family who were preëminent in
speed and stature, and harmonized best with
their surroundings, outstripped their fellows
and transmitted these qualities to their progeny,
until, as a result of long ages of natural
selection, there was developed the modern
horse. The rest man has done: the heavy,
slow-paced dray horse, the fleet trotter, the
huge Percheron, and the diminutive pony are
one and all the recent products of artificial
selection.

[176]

REFERENCES

The best collection of fossil horses, and one specially
arranged to illustrate the line of descent of the modern
horse, is to be found in the American Museum of Natural
History, New York, but some good specimens, of particular
interest because they were described by Professor
Marsh and studied by Huxley are in the Yale University
Museum. They are referred to in Huxley's "American
Addresses; Lectures on Evolution." "The
Horse," by Sir W. H. Flower, discusses the horse in a
popular manner from various points of view and contains
numerous references to books and articles on the subject
from which anyone wishing for further information could
obtain it.

Fig. 35.—The Mammoth.


From a drawing by Charles R. Knight.

[177]

X

THE MAMMOTH

In the October number of McClure's Magazine for 1899
was published a short story, "The Killing of the Mammoth,"
by "H. Tukeman," which, to the amazement of the editors, was
taken by many readers not as fiction, but as a contribution to
natural history. Immediately after the appearance of that
number of the magazine, the authorities of the Smithsonian Institution,
in which the author had located the remains of the
beast of his fancy, were beset with visitors to see the stuffed
mammoth, and the daily mail of the Magazine, as well as that
of the Smithsonian Institution, was filled with inquiries for
more information and for requests to settle wagers as to whether
it was a true story or not. The contribution in question was
printed purely as fiction, with no idea of misleading the public,
and was entitled a story in the table of contents. We doubt if
any writer of realistic fiction ever had a more general and convincing
proof of success.

About three centuries ago, in 1696, a Russian,
one Ludloff by name, described some bones
[178]
belonging to what the Tartars called "Mamantu";
later on, Blumenbach pressed the common
name into scientific use as "Mammut,"
and Cuvier gallicized this into "Mammouth,"
whence by an easy transition we get our familiar
mammoth. We are so accustomed to
use the word to describe anything of remarkable
size that it would be only natural to suppose
that the name Mammoth was given to
the extinct elephant because of its extraordinary
bulk. Exactly the reverse of this is true,
however, for the word came to have its present
meaning because the original possessor of the
name was a huge animal. The Siberian peasants
called the creature "Mamantu," or
"ground-dweller," because they believed it to
be a gigantic mole, passing its life beneath the
ground and perishing when by any accident it
saw the light. The reasoning that led to this
belief was very simple and the logic very good;
no one had ever seen a live Mamantu, but
there were plenty of its bones lying at or near
the surface; consequently if the animal did not
live above the ground, it must dwell below.

To-day, nearly every one knows that the[179]
mammoth was a sort of big, hairy elephant,
now extinct, and nearly every one has a general
idea that it lived in the North. There is
some uncertainty as to whether the mammoth
was a mastodon, or the mastodon a mammoth,
and there is a great deal of misconception as
to the size and abundance of this big beast. It
may be said in passing that the mastodon is
only a second or third cousin of the mammoth,
but that the existing elephant of Asia is a very
near relative, certainly as near as a first cousin,
possibly a very great grandson. Popularly, the
mammoth is supposed to have been a colossus
somewhere from twelve to twenty feet in
height, beside whom modern elephants would
seem insignificant; but as "trout lose much in
dressing," so mammoths shrink in measuring,
and while there were doubtless Jumbos among
them in the way of individuals of exceptional
magnitude, the majority were decidedly under
Jumbo's size. The only mounted mammoth
skeleton in this country, that in the Chicago
Academy of Sciences, is one of the largest, the
thigh-bone measuring five feet one inch in
length, or a foot more than that of Jumbo;[180]
and as Jumbo stood eleven feet high, the rule
of three applied to this thigh-bone would give
the living animal a height of thirteen feet
eight inches. The height of this specimen is
given as thirteen feet in its bones, with an estimate
of fourteen feet in its clothes; but as the
skeleton is obviously mounted altogether too
high, it is pretty safe to say that thirteen feet
is a good, fair allowance for the height of this
animal when alive. As for the majority of
mammoths, they would not average more than
nine or ten feet high. Sir Samuel Baker tells
us that he has seen plenty of wild African elephants
that would exceed Jumbo by a foot or
more, and while this must be accepted with
caution, since unfortunately he neglected to
put a tape-line on them, yet Mr. Thomas
Baines did measure a specimen twelve feet
high. This, coupled with Sir Samuel's statement,
indicates that there is not so much difference
between the mammoth and the elephant
as there might be. This applies to the
mammoth par excellence, the species known
scientifically as Elephas primigenius, whose
remains are found in many parts of the Northern[181]
Hemisphere and occur abundantly in Siberia
and Alaska. There were other elephants
than the mammoth, and some that exceeded
him in size, notably Elephas meridionalis of
southern Europe, and Elephas columbi of our
Southern and Western States, but even the
largest cannot positively be asserted to have
exceeded a height of thirteen feet. Tusks
offer convenient terms of comparison, and
those of an average fully grown mammoth
are from eight to ten feet in length; those of
the famous St. Petersburg specimen and those
of the huge specimen in Chicago measuring
respectively nine feet three inches, and nine
feet eight inches. So far as the writer is
aware, the largest tusks actually measured are
two from Alaska, one twelve feet ten inches
long, weighing 190 pounds, reported by Mr.
Jay Beach; and another eleven feet long,
weighing 200 pounds, noted by Mr. T. L.
Brevig. Compared with these we have the
big tusk that used to stand on Fulton Street,
New York, just an inch under nine feet long,
and weighing 184 pounds, or the largest shown
at Chicago in 1893, which was seven feet six[182]
inches long, and weighed 176 pounds. The
largest, most beautiful tusks, probably, ever
seen in this country were a pair brought from
Zanzibar and displayed by Messrs. Tiffany &
Company in 1900. The measurements and
weights of these were as follows: length along
outer curve, ten feet and three-fourths of an
inch, circumference one foot, eleven inches,
weight, 224 pounds; length along outer curve,
ten feet, three and one-half inches, circumference
two feet and one-fourth of an inch, weight,
239 pounds.

For our knowledge of the external appearance
of the mammoth we are indebted to the
more or less entire examples which have been
found at various times in Siberia, but mainly
to the noted specimen found in 1799 near the
Lena, embedded in the ice, where it had been
reposing, so geologists tell us, anywhere from
10,000 to 50,000 years. How the creature
gradually thawed out of its icy tomb, and the
tusks were taken by the discoverer and sold
for ivory; how the dogs fed upon the flesh in
summer, while bears and wolves feasted upon
it in winter; how the animal was within an[183]
ace of being utterly lost to science when, at
the last moment, the mutilated remains were
rescued by Mr. Adams, is an old story, often
told and retold. Suffice it to say that, besides
the bones, enough of the beast was preserved
to tell us exactly what was the covering of this[184]
ancient elephant, and to show that it was a
creature adapted to withstand the northern
cold and fitted for living on the branches of
the birch and hemlock.

Fig. 36.—Skeleton of the Mammoth in the Royal
Museum of St. Petersburg.

The exact birthplace of the mammoth is as
uncertain as that of many other great characters;
but his earliest known resting-place is in
the Cromer Forest Beds of England, a country
inhabited by him at a time when the German
Ocean was dry land and Great Britain part of
a peninsula. Here his remains are found to-day,
while from the depths of the North Sea
the hardy trawlers have dredged hundreds, aye
thousands, of mammoth teeth in company with
soles and turbot. If, then, the mammoth originated
in western Europe, and not in that great
graveyard of fossil elephants, northern India,
eastward he went spreading over all Europe
north of the Pyrenees and Alps, save only
Scandinavia, whose glaciers offered no attractions,
scattering his bones abundantly by the
wayside to serve as marvels for future ages.
Strange indeed have been some of the tales to
which these and other elephantine remains
have given rise when they came to light in the[185]
good old days when knowledge of anatomy
was small and credulity was great. The least
absurd theory concerning them was that they
were the bones of the elephants which Hannibal
brought from Africa. Occasionally they
were brought forward as irrefutable evidences
of the deluge; but usually they figured as the
bones of giants, the most famous of them being
known as Teutobochus, King of the Cimbri, a
lusty warrior said to have had a height of nineteen
feet. Somewhat smaller, but still of respectable
height, fourteen feet, was "Littell
Johne" of Scotland, whereof Hector Boece
wrote, concluding, in a moralizing tone, "Be
quilk (which) it appears how extravegant and
squaire pepill grew in oure regioun afore they
were effeminat with lust and intemperance of
mouth." More than this, these bones have
been venerated in Greece and Rome as the remains
of pagan heroes, and later on worshipped
as relics of Christian saints. Did not the
church of Valencia possess an elephant tooth
which did duty as that of St. Christopher,
and, so late as 1789, was not a thigh-bone, figuring
as the arm-bone of a saint, carried in[186]
procession through the streets in order to
bring rain?

Out of Europe eastward into Asia the mammoth
took his way, and having peopled that
vast region, took advantage of a land connection
then existing between Asia and North
America and walked over into Alaska, in company
with the forerunners of the bison and the
ancestors of the mountain sheep and Alaskan
brown bear. Still eastward and southward he
went, until he came to the Atlantic coast, the
latitude of southern New York roughly marking
the southern boundary of the broad domain
over which the mammoth roamed undisturbed.[15]
Not that of necessity all this vast area
was occupied at one time; but this was the
range of the mammoth during Pleistocene
time, for over all this region his bones and
teeth are found in greater or less abundance
and in varying conditions of preservation. In
regions like parts of Siberia and Alaska, where
[187]the bones are entombed in a wet and cold,
often icy, soil, the bones and tusks are almost
as perfectly preserved as though they had been
deposited but a score of years ago, while remains
so situated that they have been subjected
to varying conditions of dryness and
moisture are always in a fragmentary state.
As previously noted, several more or less entire
carcasses of the mammoth have been discovered
in Siberia, only to be lost; and, while no
entire animal has so far been found in Alaska,
some day one may yet come to light. That
there is some possibility of this is shown by the
discovery, recorded by Mr. Dall, of the partial
skeleton of a mammoth in the bank of the
Yukon with some of the fat still present, and
although this had been partially converted into
adipocere, it was fresh enough to be used by
the natives for greasing, not their boots, but
their boats. And up to the present time this
is the nearest approach to finding a live mammoth
in Alaska.

As to why the mammoth became extinct,
we know absolutely nothing, although various
theories, some much more ingenious than plausible,[188]
have been advanced to account for their
extermination—they perished of starvation;
they were overtaken by floods on their supposed
migrations and drowned in detachments;
they fell through the ice, equally in detachments,
and were swept out to sea. But all
we can safely say is that long ages ago
the last one perished off the face of the earth.
Strange it is, too, that these mighty beasts,
whose bulk was ample to protect them against
four-footed foes, and whose woolly coat was
proof against the cold, should have utterly vanished.
They ranged from England eastward
to New York, almost around the world; from
the Alps to the Arctic Ocean; and in such
numbers that to-day their tusks are articles of
commerce, and fossil ivory has its price current
as well as wheat. Mr. Boyd Dawkins thinks
that the mammoth was actually exterminated
by early man, but, even granting that this
might be true for southern and western Europe,
it could not be true of the herds that inhabited
the wastes of Siberia, or of the thousands
that flourished in Alaska and the western
United States. So far as man is concerned,[189]
the mammoth might still be living in these localities,
where, before the discovery of gold
drew thousands of miners to Alaska, there were
vast stretches of wilderness wholly untrodden
by the foot of man. Neither could this theory
account for the disappearance of the mastodon
from North America, where that animal covered
so vast a stretch of territory that man,
unaided by nature, could have made little impression
on its numbers. That many were
swept out to sea by the flooded rivers of Siberia
is certain, for some of the low islands off
the coast are said to be formed of sand, ice,
and bones of the mammoth, and thence, for
hundreds of years, have come the tusks which
are sold in the market beside those of the
African and Indian elephants.

That man was contemporary with the mammoth
in southern Europe is fairly certain, for
not only are the remains of the mammoth and
man's flint weapons found together, but in a
few instances some primeval Landseer graved
on slate, ivory, or reindeer antler a sketchy
outline of the beast, somewhat impressionistic
perhaps, but still, like the work of a true artist,[190]
preserving the salient features. We see the
curved tusks, the snaky trunk, and the shaggy
coat that we know belonged to the mammoth,
and we may feel assured that if early man did
not conquer the clumsy creature with fire and
flint, he yet gazed upon him from the safe
vantage point of some lofty tree or inaccessible
rock, and then went home to tell his wife
and neighbors how the animal escaped because
his bow missed fire. That man and mammoth
lived together in North America is uncertain;
so far there is no evidence to show that they
did, although the absence of such evidence is
no proof that they did not. That any live
mammoth has for centuries been seen on the
Alaskan tundras is utterly improbable, and on
Mr. C. H. Townsend seems to rest the responsibility
of having, though quite unintentionally,
introduced the Alaskan Live Mammoth into
the columns of the daily press. It befell in this
wise: Among the varied duties of our revenue
marine is that of patrolling and exploring the
shores of arctic Alaska and the waters of the
adjoining sea, and it is not so many years ago
that the cutter Corwin, if memory serves[191]
aright, held the record of farthest north on the
Pacific side. On one of these northern trips,
to the Kotzebue Sound region, famous for the
abundance of its deposits of mammoth bones,[16]
the Corwin carried Mr. Townsend, then naturalist
to the United States Fish Commission.
At Cape Prince of Wales some natives came
on board bringing a few bones and tusks of
the mammoth, and upon being questioned as
to whether or not any of the animals to which
they pertained were living, promptly replied
that all were dead, inquiring in turn if the
white men had ever seen any, and if they
knew how these animals, so vastly larger than
a reindeer, looked.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was on
board a text-book of geology containing the
well-known cut of the St. Petersburg mammoth,
and this was brought forth, greatly to
the edification of the natives, who were delighted
at recognizing the curved tusks and
the bones they knew so well. Next the na[192]tives
wished to know what the outside of the
creature looked like, and as Mr. Townsend
had been at Ward's establishment in Rochester
when the first copy of the Stuttgart restoration
was made, he rose to the emergency,
and made a sketch. This was taken ashore,
together with a copy of the cut of the skeleton
that was laboriously made by an Innuit
sprawled out at full length on the deck. Now
the Innuits, as Mr. Townsend tells us, are
great gadabouts, making long sledge journeys
in winter and equally long trips by boat in
summer, while each season they hold a regular
fair on Kotzebue Sound, where a thousand or
two natives gather to barter and gossip. On
these journeys and at these gatherings the
sketches were no doubt passed about, copied,
and recopied, until a large number of Innuits
had become well acquainted with the appearance
of the mammoth, a knowledge that naturally
they were well pleased to display to any
white visitors. Also, like the Celt, the Alaskan
native delights to give a "soft answer,"
and is always ready to furnish the kind of information
desired. Thus in due time the newspaper[193]
man learned that the Alaskans could
make pictures of the mammoth, and that they
had some knowledge of its size and habits; so
with inference and logic quite as good as that
of the Tungusian peasant, the reporter came
to the conclusion that somewhere in the frozen
wilderness the last survivor of the mammoths
must still be at large. And so, starting on
the Pacific coast, the Live Mammoth story
wandered from paper to paper, until it had
spread throughout the length and breadth of
the United States, when it was captured by
Mr. Tukeman, who with much artistic color
and some realistic touches, transferred it to
McClure's Magazine, and—unfortunately for
the officials thereof—to the Smithsonian Institution.

And now, once for all, it may be said that
there is no mounted mammoth to awe the visitor
to the national collections or to any other;
and yet there seems no good and conclusive
reason why there should not be. True, there
are no live mammoths to be had at any price;
neither are their carcasses to be had on demand;
still there is good reason to believe[194]
that a much smaller sum than that said to
have been paid by Mr. Conradi for the mammoth
which is not in the Smithsonian Institution,
would place one there.[17] It probably
could not be done in one year; it might not
be possible in five years; but should any man
of means wish to secure enduring fame by
showing the world the mammoth as it stood in
life, a hundred centuries ago, before the dawn
of even tradition, he could probably accomplish
the result by the expenditure of a far less sum
than it would cost to participate in an international
yacht race.

REFERENCES

The mounted skeleton of the mammoth in the museum
of the Chicago Academy of Science is still the only one on
exhibition in the United States; this specimen is probably
the Southern Mammoth, Elephas columbi, a species, or
race, characterized by its great size and the coarse structure
of the teeth. Remains of the mammoth are common
enough but, save in Alaska, they are usually in a poor
state of preservation or consist of isolated bones or teeth.
A great many skeletons of mammoth have been found by
gold miners in Alaska, and with proper care some of
these could undoubtedly have been secured. Naturally,
however, the miners do not feel like taking the time and
trouble to exhume bones whose value is uncertain, while
the cost of transportation precludes the bringing out of
many specimens.

Some reports of mammoths have been based on the
bones of whales, including a skull that was figured in
the daily papers.

Almost every museum has on exhibition teeth of the
mammoth, and there is a skull, though from a small individual,
of the Southern Mammoth in the American
Museum of Natural History, New York.

The tusk obtained by Mr. Beach and mentioned in
the text still holds the record for mammoth tusks. The[196]
greatest development of tusks occurred in Elephas ganesa,
a species found in Pliocene deposits of the Siwalik
Hills, India. This species appears not to have exceeded
the existing elephant in bulk, but the tusks are twelve feet
nine inches long, and two feet two inches in circumference.
How the animal ever carried them is a mystery,
both on account of their size and their enormous leverage.
As for teeth, an upper grinder of Elephas columbi in the
United States National Museum is ten and one-half
inches high, nine inches wide, the grinding face being
eight by five inches. This tooth, which is unusually perfect,
retaining the outer covering of cement, came from
Afton, Indian Territory, and weighs a little over fifteen
pounds. The lower tooth, shown in Fig. 38, is twelve
inches long, and the grinding face is nine by three and
one-half inches; this is also from Elephas columbi.
Grinders of the Northern Mammoth are smaller, and the
plates of enamel thinner, and closer to one another.
Mr. F. E. Andrews, of Gunsight, Texas, reports having
found a femur, or thigh-bone five feet four inches
long, and a humerus measuring four feet three inches,
these being the largest bones on record indicating an
animal fourteen feet high.

There is a vast amount of literature relating to the
mammoth, some of it very untrustworthy. A list of all
discoveries of specimens in the flesh is given by Nordens[197]kiold
in "The Voyage of the Vega" and "The Mammoth
and the Flood" by Sir Henry Howorth, is a mine of information.
Mr. Townsend's "Alaska Live-Mammoth
Story" may be found in "Forest and Stream" for
August 14, 1897.

Fig. 37.—The Mammoth as Engraved by a Primitive
Artist on a Piece of Mammoth Tusk.

[198]

XI

THE MASTODON

The name mastodon is given to a number of
species of fossil elephants differing from the
true elephants, of which the mammoth is an
example, in the structure of the teeth. In the
mastodons the crown, or grinding face of
the tooth, is formed by more or less regular

shaped cross ridges, covered with enamel,
while in the elephants the enamel takes the
form of narrow, pocket-shaped plates, set upright
in the body of the tooth. Moreover, in
the mastodons the roots of the teeth are long
prongs, while in the elephants the roots are
small and irregular. A glance at the cuts will
show these distinctions better than they can
be explained by words. Back in the past, however,
we meet, as we should if there is any truth[199]
in the theory of evolution, with elephants having
an intermediate pattern of teeth.

Fig. 38.—Tooth of Mastodon and of Mammoth.

There is usually, or at least often, another
point of difference between elephants and mastodons,
for many of the latter not only had
tusks in the upper, but in the lower jaw, and
these are never found in any of the true elephants.
The lower tusks are longer and larger
in the earlier species of mastodon than in
those of more recent age and in the latest species,
the common American mastodon, the little
lower tusks were usually shed early in life.
These afford some hints of the relationships of
the mastodon; for in Europe are found remains
of a huge beast well called Dinotherium,
or terrible animal, which possessed lower
tusks only, and these, instead of sticking out[200]
from the jaw are bent directly downwards.
No perfect skull of this creature has yet been
found, but it is believed to have had a short
trunk. For a long time nothing but the skull
was known, and some naturalists thought the
animal to have been a gigantic manatee, or sea
cow, and that the tusks were used for tearing
food from the bottom of rivers and for anchoring
the animal to the bank, just as the walrus
uses his tusks for digging clams and climbing
out upon the ice. In the first restorations of
Dinotherium it is represented lying amidst
reeds, the feet concealed from view, the head
alone visible, but now it is pictured as standing
erect, for the discovery of massive leg-bones
has definitely settled the question as to
whether it did or did not have limbs.

There is another hint of relationship in the
upper tusks of the earlier mastodons, and this
is the presence of a band of enamel running
down each tusk. In all gnawing animals the
front, cutting teeth are formed of soft dentine,
or ivory, faced with a plate of enamel, just as
the blade of a chisel or plane is formed of a
plate of tempered steel backed with soft iron;[201]
the object of this being the same in both tooth
and chisel, to keep the edge sharp by wearing
away the softer material. In the case of the
chisel this is done by a man with a grindstone,
but with the tooth it is performed automatically
and more pleasantly by the gnawing of
food. In the mastodon and elephant the tusks,
which are the representatives of the cutting
teeth of rodents, are wide apart, and of course
do not gnaw anything, but the presence of
these enamel bands hints at a time when they
and their owner were smaller and differently
shaped, and the teeth were used for cutting.
Thus, great though the disparity of size may
be, there is a suggestion that through the mastodon
the elephant is distantly related to the
mouse, and that, could we trace their respective
pedigrees far enough, we might find a common
ancestor.

This presence of structures that are apparently
of no use, often worse than useless, is
regarded as the survival of characters that once
served some good purpose, like the familiar
buttons on the sleeve or at the back of a man's
coat, or the bows and ruffles on a woman's[202]
dress. We are told that these are put on "to
make the dress look pretty," but the student
regards the bows as vestiges of the time when
there were no buttons and hooks and eyes had
not been invented, and dresses were tied together
with strings or ribbons. As for ruffles,
they took the place of flounces, and flounces
are vestiges of the time when a young woman
wore the greater part of her wardrobe on her
back, putting on one dress above another, the
bottoms of the skirts showing like so many
flounces. So buttons, ruffles, and the vermiform
appendix of which we hear so much all
fall in the category of vestigial structures.

Where the mastodons originated, we know
not: Señor Ameghino thinks their ancestors
are to be found in Patagonia, and he is very
probably wrong; Professor Cope thought they
came from Asia, and he is probably right; or
they may have immigrated from the convenient
Antarctica, which is called up to account
for various facts in the distribution of animals.[18]

Neither do we at present know just how many
species of mastodons there may have been in
the Western Hemisphere, for most of them are
known from scattered teeth, single jaws, and
odd bones, so that we cannot tell just what differences
may be due to sex or individual variation.
It is certain, however, that several distinct
kinds, or species, have inhabited various
parts of North America, while remains of others
occur in South America. The mastodon, however,
the one most recent in point of time, and
the best known because its remains are scattered
far and wide over pretty much the length
and breadth of the United States, and are
found also in southern and western Canada,
is the well-named Mastodon americanus,[19] and
unless otherwise specified this alone will be
meant when the name mastodon is used. In
some localities the mastodon seems to have
abounded, but between the Hudson and Connecticut
Rivers indications of its former pres[204]ence
are rare, and east of that they are practically
wanting. The best preserved specimens
come from Ulster and Orange Counties, New
York, for these seem to have furnished the
animal with the best facilities for getting mired.
Just west of the Catskills, parallel with the
valley of the Hudson, is a series of meadows,
bogs, and pools marking the sites of swamps
that came into existence after the recession of
the mighty ice-sheet that long covered eastern
North America, and in these many a mastodon,
seeking for food or water, or merely wallowing
in the mud, stuck fast and perished
miserably. And here to-day the spade of the
farmer as he sinks a ditch to drain what is left
of some beaver pond of bygone days, strikes
some bone as brown and rugged as a root, so
like a piece of water-soaked wood that nine
times out of ten it is taken for a fragment of
tree-trunk.

The first notice of the mastodon in North
America goes back to 1712, and is found in a
letter from Cotton Mather to Dr. Woodward
(of England?) written at Boston on November
17th, in which he speaks of a large work in[205]
manuscript entitled Biblia Americana, and
gives as a sample a note on the passage in Genesis
(VI. 4) in which we read that "there
were giants in the earth in those days." We
are told that this is confirmed by "the bones
and teeth of some large animal found lately in
Albany, in New England, which for some
reason he thinks to be human; particularly a
tooth brought from the place where it was
found to New York in 1705, being a very large
grinder, weighing four pounds and three quarters;
with a bone supposed to be a thigh-bone,
seventeen feet long," the total length of the
body being taken as seventy-five feet. Thus
bones of the mastodon, as well as those of the
mammoth, have done duty as those of giants.

And as the first mastodon remains recorded
from North America came from the region
west of the Hudson, so the first fairly complete
skeleton also came from that locality,
secured at a very considerable outlay of money
and a still more considerable expenditure of
labor by the exertions of C. W. Peale. This
specimen was described at some length by
Rembrandt Peale in a privately printed pamphlet,[206]
now unfortunately rare, and described
in some respects better than has been done by
any subsequent writer, since the points of difference
between various parts of the mastodon
and elephant were clearly pointed out. This
skeleton was exhibited in London, and afterwards
at Peale's Museum in Philadelphia
where, with much other valuable material, it
was destroyed by fire.

Struck by the evident crushing power of the
great ridged molars, Peale was led to believe
that the mastodon was a creature of carnivorous
habits, and so described it, but this error
is excusable, the more that to this day, when
the mastodon is well known, and its description
published time and again in the daily papers,
finders of the teeth often consider them as belonging
to some huge beast of prey.

Since the time of Peale several fine specimens
have been taken from Ulster and Orange
Counties, among them the well-known "Warren
Mastodon," and there is not the slightest
doubt that many more will be recovered from
the meadows, swamps, and pond holes of these
two counties.

[207]

Fig. 39.—The Missourium of Koch, from a Tracing of the Figure Illustrating
Koch's Description.

[208]

The next mastodon to appear on the scene
was the so-called Missourium of Albert Koch,
which he constructed somewhat as he did the
Hydrarchus (see p. 61) of several individuals
pieced together, thus forming a skeleton that
was a monster in more ways than one. To
heighten the effect, the curved tusks were so
placed that they stood out at right angles to
the sides of the head, like the swords upon
the axles of ancient war chariots. Like Peale's
specimen this was exhibited in London, and
there it still remains, for, stripped of its superfluous
bones, and remounted, it may now be
seen in the British Museum.

Many a mastodon has come to light since
the time of Koch, for while it is commonly
supposed that remains of the animal are great
rarities, as a matter of fact they are quite
common, and it may safely be said that during
the seasons of ditching, draining, and well-digging
not a week passes without one or more
mastodons being unearthed. Not that these
are complete skeletons, very far from it, the
majority of finds are scattered teeth, crumbling
tusks, or massive leg-bones, but still the[209]
mastodon is far commoner in the museums of
this country than is the African elephant, for
at the present date there are eleven of the
former to one of the latter, the single skeleton
of African elephant being that of Jumbo in
the American Museum of Natural History.
If one may judge by the abundance of bones,
mastodons must have been very numerous
in some favored localities such as parts of
Michigan, Florida, and Missouri and about
Big Bone Lick, Ky. Perhaps the most noteworthy
of all deposits is that at Kimmswick,
about twenty miles south of St. Louis, where
in a limited area Mr. L. W. Beehler has exhumed
bones representing several hundred
individuals, varying in size from a mere baby
mastodon up to the great tusker whose wornout
teeth proclaim that he had reached the
limit of even mastodonic old age. The spot
where this remarkable deposit was found is at
the foot of a bluff near the junction of two
little streams, and it seems probable that in
the days when these were larger the spring
floods swept down the bodies of animals that
had perished during the winter to ground in[210]
an eddy beneath the bluff. Or as the place
abounds in springs of sulphur and salt water
it may be that this was where the animals
assembled during cold weather, just as the
moas are believed to have gathered in the
swamps of New Zealand, and here the weaker
died and left their bones.

The mastodon must have looked very much
like any other elephant, though a little shorter
in the legs and somewhat more heavily built
than either of the living species, while the
head was a trifle flatter and the jaw decidedly
longer. The tusks are a variable quantity,
sometimes merely bowing outwards, often
curving upwards to form a half circle; they
were never so long as the largest mammoth
tusks, but to make up for this they were a
shade stouter for their length. As the mastodon
ranged well to the north it is fair to suppose
that he may have been covered with long
hair, a supposition that seems to be borne out
by the discovery, noted by Rembrandt Peale, of
a mass of long, coarse, woolly hair buried in one
of the swamps of Ulster County, New York.
And with these facts in mind, aided by photographs
[211]
of various skeletons of mastodons, Mr.
Gleeson made the restoration which accompanies
this chapter.

Fig. 40.—The Mastodon.


From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson.

As for the size of the mastodon, this, like
that of the mammoth, is popularly much over-estimated,
and it is more than doubtful if any
attained the height of a full-grown African
elephant. The largest femur, or thigh-bone,
that has come under the writer's notice was
one he measured as it lay in the earth at
Kimmswick, and this was just four feet long,
three inches shorter than the thigh-bone of
Jumbo. Several of the largest thigh-bones
measured show so striking an unanimity in
size, between 46 and 47 inches in length, that
we may be pretty sure they represent the average
old "bull" mastodon, and if we say that
these animals stood ten feet high we are
probably doing them full justice. An occasional
tusk reaches a length of ten feet, but
seven or eight is the usual size, with a diameter
of as many inches, and this is no larger than
the tusks of the African elephant would grow
if they had a chance. It is painful to be
obliged to scale down the mastodon as we have
[212]
just done the mammoth, but if any reader
knows of specimens larger than those noted,
he should by all means publish their measurements.[20]

The disappearance of the mastodon is as difficult
to account for as that of the mammoth,
and, as will be noted, there is absolutely no
evidence to show that man had any hand in it.
Neither can it be ascribed to change of climate,
for the mastodon, as indicated by the wide distribution
of its bones, was apparently adapted
to a great diversity of climates, and was as
much at home amid the cool swamps of Michigan
and New York as on the warm savannas
of Florida and Louisiana. Certainly the much
used, and abused, glacial epoch cannot be held
accountable for the extermination of the creature,
for the mastodon came into New York
after the recession of the great ice-sheet, and
tarried to so late a date that bones buried in
[213]the swamps retain much of their animal matter.
So recent, comparatively speaking, has
been the disappearance of the mastodon, and
so fresh-looking are some of its bones, that
Thomas Jefferson thought in his day that it
might still be living in some part of the then
unexplored Northwest.

It is a moot question whether or not man
and the mastodon were contemporaries in
North America, and while many there be who,
like the writer of these lines, believe that this
was the case, an expression of belief is not a
demonstration of fact. The best that can be
said is that there are scattered bits of testimony,
slight though they are, which seem to
point that way, but no one so strong by itself
that it could not be shaken by sharp cross-questioning
and enable man to prove an alibi
in a trial by jury. For example, in the great
bone deposit at Kimmswick, Mo., Mr. Beehler
found a flint arrowhead, but this may have lain
just over the bone-bearing layer, or have got
in by some accident in excavating. How easily
a mistake may be made is shown by the report
sent to the United States National Museum of[214]
many arrowheads associated with mastodon
bones in a spring at Afton, Indian Territory.
This spring was investigated, and a few mastodon
bones and flint arrowheads were found,
but the latter were in a stratum just above the
bones, although this was overlooked by the first
diggers.[21] Koch reported finding charcoal and
arrowheads so associated with mastodon bones
that he inferred the animal to have been destroyed
by fire and arrows after it became
mired. It has been said that Koch could have
had no object in disseminating this report, and
hence that it may be credited, but he had just
as much interest in doing this as he did in fabricating
the Hydrarchus and the Missourium,
and his testimony is not to be considered seriously.
It seems to be with the mastodon
much as it is with the sea-serpent; the latter
never appears to a naturalist, remains of the
former are never found by a trained observer
[215]associated with indications of the presence of
man. Perhaps an exception should be made
in the case of Professor J. M. Clarke, who
found fragments of charcoal in a deposit of
muck under some bones of mastodon.

We may pass by the so-called "Elephant
Mound," which to the eye of an unimaginative
observer looks as if it might have been intended
for any one of several beasts; also, with
bated breath and due respect for the bitter controversy
waged over them, pass we by the elephant
pipes. There remains, then, not a bit
of man's handiwork, not a piece of pottery, engraved
stone, or scratched bone that can unhesitatingly
be said to have been wrought into
the shape of an elephant before the coming of
the white man. True, there is "The Lenape
Stone," found near Doyleston, Pa., in 1872,
a gorget graven on one side with the representation
of men attacking an elephant, while the
other bears a number of figures of various animals.
The good faith of the finder of this
stone is unimpeachable, but it is a curious fact
that, while this gorget is elaborately decorated
on both sides, no similar stone, out of all that[216]
have been found, bears any image whatsoever.
On the other hand, if not made by the aborigines,
who made it, why was it made, and why
did nine years elapse between the discovery of
the first and second portions of the broken ornament?
These are questions the reader may
decide for himself; the author will only say
that to his mind the drawing is too elaborate,
and depicts entirely too much to have been
made by a primitive artist. A much better bit
of testimony seems to be presented by a fragment
of Fulgur shell found near Hollyoak,
Del., and now in the United States National
Museum, which bears a very rudely scratched
image of an animal that may have been intended
for a mastodon or a bison. This piece
of shell is undeniably old, but there is, unfortunately,
the uncertainty just mentioned as to
the animal depicted. The familiar legend of
the Big Buffalo that destroyed animals and
men and defied even the lightnings of the
Great Spirit has been thought by some to
have originated in a tradition of the mastodon
handed down from ancient times; but why
consider that the mastodon is meant? Why[217]
not a legendary bison that has increased with
years of story-telling? And so the co-existence
of man and mastodon must rest as a case
of not proven, although there is a strong probability
that the two did live together in the
dim ages of the past, and some day the evidence
may come to light that will prove it beyond
a peradventure. If scientific men are
charged with obstinacy and unwarranted incredulity
in declining to accept the testimony
so far presented, it must be remembered that
the evidence as to the existence of the sea
serpent is far stronger, since it rests on the testimony
of eye-witnesses, and yet the creature
himself has never been seen by a trained observer,
nor has any specimen, not a scale, a
tooth, or a bone, ever made its way into any
museum.

REFERENCES

There are at least eleven mounted skeletons of the
Mastodon in the United States, and the writer trusts he
may be pardoned for mentioning only those which are
most accessible. These are in the American Museum of
Natural History, New York; the State Museum, Al[218]bany, N. Y.;
Field Columbian Museum, Chicago; Carnegie
Museum, Pittsburg; Museum of Comparative
Zoölogy, Cambridge, Mass. There is no mounted skeleton
in the United States National Museum, nor has there
ever been.

The heaviest pair of tusks is in the possession of T. O.
Tuttle, Seneca, Mich., and they are nine and one-half
inches in diameter, and a little over eight feet long;
very few tusks, however, reach eight inches in diameter.
The thigh-bone of an old male mastodon measures from
forty-five to forty-six and one-half inches long, the humerus
from thirty-five to forty inches. The height of
the mounted skeleton is of little value as an indication of
size, since it depends so much upon the manner in which
the skeleton is mounted. The grinders of the mastodon
have three cross ridges, save the last, which has four, and
a final elevation, or heel. This does not apply to the
teeth of very young animals. The presence or absence
of the last grinder will show whether or not the animal is
of full age and size, while the amount of wear indicates
the comparative age of the specimen.

The skeleton of the "Warren Mastodon" is described
at length by Dr. J. C. Warren, in a quarto volume entitled
"Mastodon Giganteus." There is much information
in a little book by J. P. MacLean, "Mastodon,
Mammoth, and Man," but the reader must not accept all
its statements unhesitatingly. The first volume, 1887,[219]
of the New Scribner's Magazine contains an article on
"American Elephant Myths," by Professor W. B. Scott,
but he is under an erroneous impression regarding the
size of the mastodon, and photographs of the Maya
carvings show that their resemblance to elephants has been
exaggerated in the wood cuts. The story of the Lenape
Stone is told at length by H. C. Mercer in "The Lenape
Stone, or the Indian and the Mammoth."

Fig. 41.—The Lenape Stone, Reduced.

[220]

XII

WHY DO ANIMALS BECOME EXTINCT?

It is often asked "why do animals become extinct?"
but the question is one to which it is
impossible to give a comprehensive and satisfactory
reply; this chapter does not pretend
to do so, merely to present a few aspects of
this complicated, many-sided problem.

In very many cases it may be said that actual
extermination has not taken place, but
that in the course of evolution one species has
passed into another; species may have been
lost, but the race, or phylum endures, just as
in the growth of a tree, the twigs and branches
of the sapling disappear, while the tree, as a
whole, grows onward and upward. This is
what we see in the horse, which is the living
representative of an unbroken line reaching[221]
back to the little Eocene Hyracothere. So in
a general way it may be said that much of
what at the first glance we might term extinction
is really the replacement of one set of
animals by another better adapted to surrounding
conditions.

Again, there are many cases of animals, and
particularly of large animals, so peculiar in
their make up, so very obviously adapted to
their own special surroundings that it requires
little imagination to see that it would have
been a difficult matter for them to have responded
to even a slight change in the world
about them. Such great and necessarily sluggish
brutes as Brontosaurus and Diplodocus,
with their tons of flesh, small heads, and feeble
teeth, were obviously reared in easy circumstances,
and unfitted to succeed in any strenuous
struggle for existence. Stegosaurus, with
his bizarre array of plates and spines, and huge-headed
Triceratops, had evidently carried specialization
to an extreme, while in turn the
carnivorous forms must have required an abundant
supply of slow and easily captured prey.

Coming down to a more recent epoch, when[222]
the big Titanotheres flourished, it is easy to see
from a glance at their large, simple teeth
that these beasts needed an ample provision of
coarse vegetation, and as they seem never to
have spread far beyond their birthplace, climatic
change, modifying even a comparatively
limited area, would suffice to sweep them out
of existence. To use the epitaph proposed by
Professor Marsh for the tombstone of one of
the Dinosaurs, many a beast might say, "I,
and my race perished of over specialization."
To revert to the horse it will be remembered
that this very fate is believed to have overtaken
those almost horses the European Hippotheres;
they reached a point where no further progress
was possible, and fell by the wayside.

There is, however, still another class of cases
where species, families, orders, even, seem to
have passed out of existence without sufficient
cause. Those great marine reptiles, the Ichthyosaurs,
of Europe, the Plesiosaurs and Mosasaurs,
of our own continent, seem to have
been just as well adapted to an aquatic life as
the whales, and even better than the seals, and
we can see no reason why Columbus should[223]
not have found these creatures still disporting
themselves in the Gulf of Mexico. The best
we can do is to fall back on an unknown "law
of progress," and say that the trend of life is
toward the replacement of large, lower animals
by those smaller and intellectually higher.

But why there should be an allotted course
to any group of animals, why some species
come to an end when they are seemingly as
well fitted to endure as others now living, we
do not know, and if we say that a time comes
when the germ-plasm is incapable of further
subdivision, we merely express our ignorance
in an unnecessary number of words. The
mammoth and mastodon have already been
cited as instances of animals that have unaccountably
become extinct, and these examples
are chosen from among many on account of
their striking nature. The great ground sloths,
the Mylodons, Megatheres, and their allies, are
another case in point. At one period or another
they reached from Oregon to Virginia,
Florida, and Patagonia, though it is not
claimed that they covered all this area at one
time. And, while it may be freely admitted[224]
that in some portions of their range they may
have been extirpated by a change in food-supply,
due in turn to a change in climate, it seems
preposterous to claim that there was not at all
times, somewhere in this vast expanse of territory,
a climate mild enough and a food-supply
large enough for the support of even these
huge, sluggish creatures. We may evoke the
aid of primitive man to account for the disappearance
of this race of giants, and we know
that the two were coeval in Patagonia, where
the sloths seem to have played the rôle of domesticated
animals, but again it seems incredible
that early man, with his flint-tipped spears
and arrows, should have been able to slay even
such slow beasts as these to the very last individual.

Of course, in modern times man has directly
exterminated many animals, while by the introduction
of dogs, cats, pigs, and goats he has
indirectly not only thinned the ranks of animals,
but destroyed plant life on an enormous
scale. But in the past man's capabilities for
harm were infinitely less than now, while of
course the greatest changes took place before[225]
man even existed, so that, while he is responsible
for the great changes that have taken place
in the world's flora and fauna during recent
times, his influence, as a whole, has been insignificant.
Thus, while man exterminated the
great northern sea-cow, Rytina, and Pallas's
cormorant on the Commander Islands, these
animals were already restricted to this circumscribed
area[22] by natural causes, so that man
but finished what nature had begun. The extermination
of the great auk in European
waters was somewhat similar. There is, however,
this unfortunate difference between extermination
wrought by man and that brought
about by natural causes: the extermination of
species by nature is ordinarily slow, and the
place of one is taken by another, while the destruction
wrought by man is rapid, and the gaps
he creates remain unfilled.

Not so very long ago it was customary to
account for changes in the past life of the
globe by earthquakes, volcanic outbursts, or
[226]cataclysms of such appalling magnitude that
the whole face of nature was changed, and entire
races of living beings swept out of existence
at once. But it is now generally conceded
that while catastrophes have occurred, yet, vast
as they may have been, their effects were comparatively
local, and, while the life of a limited
region may have been ruthlessly blotted out,
life as a whole was but little affected. The
eruption of Krakatoa shook the earth to its centre
and was felt for hundreds of miles around,
yet, while it caused the death of thousands of
living beings, it remains to be shown that it
produced any effect on the life of the region
taken in its entirety.

Changes in the life of the globe have been in
the main slow and gradual, and in response to
correspondingly slow changes in the level of
portions of the earth's crust, with their far-reaching
effects on temperature, climate, and
vegetation. Animals that were what is termed
plastic kept pace with the altering conditions
about them and became modified, too, while
those that could not adapt themselves to their
surroundings died out.

[227]

How slowly changes may take place is
shown by the occurrence of a depression in the
Isthmus of Panama, in comparatively recent
geologic time, permitting free communication
between the Atlantic and Pacific, a sort of natural
inter-oceanic canal. And yet the alterations
wrought by this were, so to speak, superficial,
affecting only some species of shore fishes
and invertebrates, having no influence on the
animals of the deeper waters. Again, on the
Pacific coast are now found a number of shells
that, as we learn from fossils, were in Pliocene
time common on both coasts of the United
States, and Mr. Dall interprets this to mean
that when this continent was rising, the steeper
shore on the Pacific side permitted the shell-fish
to move downward and adapt themselves to
the ever changing shore, while on the Atlantic
side the drying of a wide strip of level sea-bottom
in a relatively short time exterminated a
large proportion of the less active mollusks.
And in this instance "relatively short" means
positively long; for, compared to the rise of a
continent from the ocean's bed, the flow of a
glacier is the rapid rush of a mountain torrent.

[228]

Then, too, while a tendency to vary seems to
be inherent in animals, some appear to be vastly
more susceptible than others to outside influences,
to respond much more readily to any
change in the world about them. In fact, Professor
Cook has recently suggested that the inborn
tendency to variation is sufficient in itself
to account for evolution, this tendency being
either repressed or stimulated as external conditions
are stable or variable.

The more uniform the surrounding conditions,
and the simpler the animal, the smaller
is the liability to change, and some animals
that dwell in the depths of the ocean, where
light and temperature vary little, if any, remain
at a standstill for long periods of time.

The genus Lingula, a small shell, traces its
ancestry back nearly to the base of the Ordovician
system of rocks, an almost inconceivable
lapse of time, while one species of brachiopod
shell endures unchanged from the Trenton
Limestone to the Lower Carboniferous. In
the first case one species has been replaced by
another, so that the shell of to-day is not exactly
like its very remote ancestor, but that[229]
the type of shell should have remained unchanged
when so many other animals have
arisen, flourished for a time, and perished,
means that there was slight tendency to variation,
and that the surrounding conditions were
uniform. Says Professor Brooks, speaking of
Lingula: "The everlasting hills are the type of
venerable antiquity; but Lingula has seen the
continents grow up, and has maintained its integrity
unmoved by the convulsions which
have given the crust of the earth its present
form."

Many instances of sudden but local extermination
might be adduced, but among them
that of the tile-fish is perhaps the most striking.
This fish, belonging to a tropical family
having its headquarters in the Gulf of Mexico,
was discovered in 1879 in moderately deep
water to the southward of Massachusetts and
on the edge of the Gulf Stream, where it was
taken in considerable numbers. In the spring
of 1882 vessels arriving at New York reported
having passed through great numbers of dead
and dying fishes, the water being thickly dotted
with them for miles. From samples brought[230]
in, it was found that the majority of these were
tile-fish, while from the reports of various vessels
it was shown that the area covered by dead
fish amounted to somewhere between 5,000
and 7,500 square miles, and the total number
of dead was estimated at not far from a billion.
This enormous and widespread destruction is
believed to have been caused by an unwonted
duration of northerly and easterly winds, which
drove the cold arctic current inshore and southwards,
chilling the warm belt in which the tile-fish
resided and killing all in that locality. It
was thought possible that the entire race might
have been destroyed, but, while none were
taken for many years, in 1899 and in 1900 a
number were caught, showing that the species
was beginning to reoccupy the waters from
which it had been driven years before.

The effect of any great fall in temperature
on animals specially adapted to a warm climate
is also illustrated by the destruction of the
Manatees in the Sebastian River, Florida, by
the winter of 1894-95, which came very near
exterminating this species. Readers may remember
that this was the winter that wrought[231]
such havoc with the blue-birds, while in the
vicinity of Washington, D. C., the fish-crows
died by hundreds, if not by thousands.

Fishes may also be exterminated over large
areas by outbursts of poisonous gases from
submarine volcanoes, or more rarely by some
vast lava flood pouring into the sea and actually
cooking all living beings in the vicinity. And
in the past these outbreaks took place on a
much larger scale than now, and naturally
wrought more widespread destruction.

A recent instance of local extermination is
the total destruction of a humming-bird, Bellona
ornata, peculiar to the island of St. Vincent,
by the West Indian hurricane of 1898,
but this is naturally extirpation on a very small
scale.

Still, the problems of nature are so involved
that while local destruction is ordinarily of
little importance, or temporary in its effects, it
may lead to the annihilation of a species by
breaking a race of animals into isolated groups,
thereby leading to inbreeding and slow decline.
The European bison, now confined to a part of
Lithuania and a portion of the Caucasus, seems[232]
to be slowly but surely approaching extinction
in spite of all efforts to preserve the race, and
no reason can be assigned for this save that the
small size of the herds has led to inbreeding
and general decadence.

In other ways, too, local calamity may be
sweeping in its effects, and that is by the destruction
of animals that resort to one spot during
the breeding season, like the fur-seals and
some sea-birds, or pass the winter months in
great flocks or herds, as do the ducks and elk.
The supposed decimation of the Moas by severe
winters has been already discussed, and the
extermination of the great auk in European
waters was indirectly due to natural causes.
These birds bred on the small, almost inaccessible
island of Eldey, off the coast of Iceland,
and when, through volcanic disturbances,
this islet sank into the sea, the few birds were
forced to other quarters, and as these were, unfortunately,
easily reached, the birds were slain
to the last one.

From the great local abundance of their remains,
it has been thought that the curious
short-legged Pliocene rhinoceros, Aphelops fos[233]siger,
was killed off in the West by blizzards
when the animals were gathered in their winter
quarters, and other long-extinct animals,
too, have been found under such conditions as
to suggest a similar fate.

Among local catastrophes brought about by
unusually prolonged cold may be cited the
decimation of the fur-seal herds of the Pribilof
Islands in 1834 and 1859, when the breeding
seals were prevented from landing by the
presence of ice-floes, and perished by thousands.
Peculiar interest is attached to this
case, because the restriction of the northern
fur-seals to a few isolated, long undiscovered
islands, is believed to have been brought about
by their complete extermination in other localities
by prehistoric man. Had these two
seasons killed all the seals, it would have been
a reversal of the customary extermination by
man of a species reduced in numbers by nature.

In the case of large animals another element
probably played a part. The larger the animal,
the fewer young, as a rule, does it bring
forth at a birth, the longer are the intervals
between births, and the slower the growth of[234]
the young. The loss of two or three broods
of sparrows or two or three litters of rabbits
makes comparatively little difference, as the
loss is soon supplied, but the death of the
young of the larger and higher mammals is a
more serious matter. A factor that has probably
played an important rôle in the extinction
of animals is the relation that exists between
various animals, and the relations that also
exist between animals and plants, so that the
existence of one is dependent on that of another.
Thus no group of living beings, plants
or animals, can be affected without in some
way affecting others, so that the injury or
destruction of some plant may result in serious
harm to some animal. Nearly everyone is
familiar with the classic example given by Darwin
of the effect of cats on the growth of red
clover. This plant is fertilized by bumble bees
only, and if the field mice, which destroy the
nests of the bees, were not kept in check by
cats, or other small carnivores, their increase
would lessen the numbers of the bees and this
in turn would cause a dearth of clover.

The yuccas present a still more wonderful[235]
example of the dependence of plants on animals,
for their existence hangs on that of a
small moth whose peculiar structure and habits
bring about the fertilization of the flower.
The two probably developed side by side until
their present state of inter-dependence was
reached, when the extinction of the one would
probably bring about that of the other.

It is this inter-dependence of living things
that makes the outcome of any direct interference
with the natural order of things more
or less problematical, and sometimes brings
about results quite different from what were
expected or intended.

The gamekeepers on the grouse moors of
Scotland systematically killed off all birds of
prey because they caught some of the grouse,
but this is believed to have caused far more
harm than good through permitting weak and
sickly birds, that would otherwise have fallen
a prey to hawks, to live and disseminate the
grouse distemper.

The destruction of sheep by coyotes led the
State of California to place a bounty on the
heads of these animals, with the result that in[236]
eighteen months the State was called upon to
pay out $187,485. As a result of the war on
coyotes the animals on which they fed, notably
the rabbits, increased so enormously that in
turn a bounty was put on rabbits, the damage
these animals caused the fruit-growers being
greater than the losses among sheep-owners
from the depredations of coyotes. And so,
says Dr. Palmer, "In this remarkable case
of legislation a large bounty was offered by a
county in the interest of fruit-growers to counteract
the effects of a State bounty expended
mainly for the benefit of sheep-owners!"

Professor Shaler, in noting the sudden disappearance
of such trees as the gums, magnolias,
and tulip poplars from the Miocene flora
of Europe has suggested that this may have
been due to the attacks, for a series of years,
of some insect enemy like the gipsy moth, and
the theory is worth considering, although it
must be looked upon as a possibility rather
than a probability. Still, anyone familiar with
the ravages of the gipsy moth in Massachusetts,
where the insect was introduced by accident,
can readily imagine what might have[237]
been the effect of some sudden increase in the
numbers of such a pest on the forests of the
past. Trees might resist the attacks of enemies
and the destruction of their leaves for
two or three years, but would be destroyed by
a few additional seasons of defoliation.

Ordinarily the abnormal increase of any insect
is promptly followed by an increase in the
number of its enemies; the pest is killed off,
the destroyers die of starvation and nature's
balance is struck. But if by some accident,
such as two or three consecutive seasons of
wet, drought, or cold, the natural increase of
the enemies was checked, the balance of nature
would be temporarily destroyed and serious
harm done. That such accidents may occur
is familiar to us by the damage wrought in
Florida and other Southern States by the unwonted
severity of the winters of 1893, 1895,
and 1899.

If any group of forest trees was destroyed in
the manner suggested by Professor Shaler, the
effects would be felt by various plants and animals.
In the first place, the insects that fed
on these trees would be forced to seek another[238]
source of food and would be brought into a
silent struggle with forms already in possession,
while the destruction of one set of plants
would be to the advantage of those with which
they came into competition and to the disadvantage
of vegetation that was protected by
the shade. Finally, these changed conditions
would react in various ways on the smaller
birds and mammals, the general effect being,
to use a well-worn simile, like that of casting
a stone into a quiet pool and setting in motion
ripples that sooner or later reach to every part
of the margin.

It is scarcely necessary to warn the reader
that for the most part this is purely conjectural,
for from the nature of the case it is bound
to be so. But it is one of the characteristics
of educated man that he wishes to know the
why and wherefore of everything, and is in a
condition of mental unhappiness until he has
at least formulated some theory which seems
to harmonize with the visible facts. And
from the few glimpses we get of the extinction
of animals from natural causes we must formulate
a theory to fit the continued extermination[239]
that has been taking place ever since living
beings came into the world and were pitted
against one another and against their surroundings
in the silent and ceaseless struggle
for existence.

THE END.

[243]

INDEX

The asterisk denotes that the animal or object is figured
on or opposite the page referred to.

Æpyornis, egg of, 145, 148,* 147, 157

eggs found in swamps, 148;

found floating, 148

eggs used for bowls, 145

origin of fable of Roc, 144, 145



Alaskan Live Mammoth Story, 190-193, 197



Anomœpus tracks, 39



Apteryx egg, 147



Archæopteryx, description of, 77, 78

discovery of, 77

earliest known bird, 70

restoration, 89*

specimens of, 70,* 88

wing, 72,* 73



Archelon, a great turtle, 54





Basilosaurus, 60

See also Zeuglodon



Beehler, L. W., 209, 213



Birds, always clad in feathers, 71, 127

earliest, 70

[244]
Birds, first intimation of, 76

rarity of fossil, 86, 87

related to reptiles, 92

wings of embryonic, 73

with teeth, 79, 88



Bison, European, 231



Books of reference, xix, 17, 32, 47, 69, 89, 110, 137, 158, 176, 197, 218



Breeding of large animals, 233



Brontornis, size of leg-bones, 149



Brontosaurus, size of bones, 96,* 97,* 109



Brooks, W. K., on Lingula, 229



Buffalo legend, 216



Buttons as vestigial structures, 202





Carcharodon auriculatus, 66

teeth, 66

megalodon, 65

estimated size, 66

teeth, 65, 67



Carson City footprints, 45



Casts, how formed, 10, 11



Cats and clover, 234



Cephalaspis, 24*



Ceratosaurus, habits, 106

restoration, 106*

skull, 110*



Changes in Nature slow, 227



[245]
Cheirotherium, 43



Chlamydosaurus, 129



Claosaurus. See Thespesius



Climate, changes in western United States, 174



Clover and cats, 234



Cold, effects of, on animals, 230, 231, 233



Cold winters, 230



Collecting fossils, 17, 112-116



Color of large land animals, 134

of young animals, 136



Covering of extinct animals sometimes indicated, 131, 132



Coyotes, effect of their destruction on fruit, 236





Dall, W. H., theory as to extinction of mollusks, 227



Dinosaurs, bones of, 109, 110

brain of, 93

collections of, 109

compared to marsupials, 95

first discovered, 90

food required by, 98

hip-bones mistaken for shoulder-blade, 120

Professor Marsh's epitaph for, 222

range, 92

recognized as new order of reptiles, 91

related to ostrich and alligator, 91

size of, 95, 96, 98

tracks, ascribed to birds, 38



[246]
Dinotherium, 200



Diplodocus, estimated weight, 99

supposed habits, 99





Egg of Æpyornis, 147, 148;

Apteryx, 147;

Ostrich, 146;

Moa, 148



Eggs, casts of, 87



Elephant, size, 180

size of tusks, 181, 182



Elephas ganesa, tusks, 196



Encrustations, 14



Extermination. See Extinction



Extinction, ascribed to great convulsions, 225

ascribed to primitive man, 188, 224

of Dinosaurs, 221

local, 225

by man, 224, 225

of Marine Reptiles, 222

often unaccountable, 222, 223

of Pliocene rhinoceros, 232

sometimes evolution, 221, 226

of Titanotheres, 222





Feathers, imprints of, 76, 132



Fishes, abundance of, 25

armored, 23, 24, 25, 28

collections of, 32

killed by cold, 230

killed by volcanoes, 231



Fish-crows, killed by cold, 231



[247]
Flesh does not petrify, 10



Flightless birds, absent from Tasmania, 155

present distribution, 154, 155

relation between flightlessness and size, 156



Folds and frills, 129



Footprints, collections of, 47

books on, 47

See also under Tracks



Fossil birds, rarity of, 86



Fossil man, 13



Fossilization a slow process, 10



Fossils, conditions under which they are formed, 5, 7

collecting, 112-116

definition of, 1

deformation of, 16

impressions, 2, 3

not necessarily petrifactions, 2

preparation of, 117-119

why they are not more common, 5, 15, 16



Fowls, muscles of, 81



Frill of Triceratops, 102



Fur-seals killed by ice-floes, 233





Gar pikes, destruction of, 26



Giant birds, reasons for distribution and flightlessness, 153



Giant Moa, 141

leg compared with that of horse, 152*



Giant Sloth, domesticated by man, 224

[248]
struggle between, 46



Giant Sloth, tracks at Carson City, 46



Gilfort, Robert, 157



Great Auk, extermination of, 232



Grouse on Scotch moors, 235





Hawkins, B. W., restorations by, 137



Hesperornis, description of, 80

impressions of feathers, 132

position of legs, 83, 84

restoration of, 82*



Hippotherium, 166, 167



Hoactzin, habits of, 74, 75*



Horn does not petrify, 130



Horse, abundant in Pleistocene time, 164

books on, 176

of bronze age, 163, 167

collections of fossil, 176

development of, 167, 168,* 175

differences between fossil and living, 163

early domestication, 165

evidence as to genealogy, 170-173

extra-toed, 172, 173

found in South America in 163, 165

of Julius Cæsar, 172

none found wild in historic times, 165

Pliocene, 166

possibility of existence in America up to the time of its discovery, 169, 170

[249]
primitive, 160, 161*



Horse, sketched by primitive man, 163

teeth of, 170

three-toed, 166



Humming-bird, exterminated by hurricane, 231



Hydrarchus, 62*



Hyracotherium, 160, 161,* 170, 174





Ichthyosaurs, silhouettes of, 132



Iguanodons, found at Bernissart, 104



Impressions of feathers, 131

of scales, 131

of skin, 131



Inbreeding, effects of, 231, 232



Information, sources of, xvi



Innuits, habits, 192



Interdependence of animals and plants, 234, 235, 238



Ivory, fossil, 2, 4, 188, 189





Jaw of Mosasaur, 54*

of reptiles, 53





Killing of the Mammoth, story, 177, 193



Kimmswick, deposit of Mastodon bones, 209



Knight, Charles R., restorations by, xviii, 136



Koch's Hydrarchus, 61, 62*

Missourium, 207,* 208





Leaves, impressions of, 3, 13



[250]
Leg of Brontornis, 149*



Leg of the Great Brontosaurus, 96*

of Giant Moa, 152*

position in Hesperornis, 83

position in ducks, 84



Lenape Stone, 215, 216, 219*



Life, earliest traces of, 21, 34



Lingula, antiquity of, 228

Professor Brooks on, 229



Loricaria, 24*





Mammoth, adapted to a cold climate, 134

Alaskan Live, Story, 190

believed to live underground, 178

bones taken for those of giants, 185

contemporary with man, 189

derivation of name, 178

description, 179

discovery of entire specimens, 183, 187

distribution, 184, 186

drawn by early man, 189, 197*

entire specimens obtainable, 194

reasons for extermination, 188

killing of the, 177

literature on, 197

misconception as to size, 179

mounted skeleton, 179

not now living, 190

preservation of remains, 187

skeletons in Alaska, 181, 195

[251]

Mammoth, in Chicago Academy of Sciences, 179

at St. Petersburg, 183*

restoration, 176*

size, 179, 180, 181

size of tusks, 181, 196

teeth, 196, 199*

teeth dredged in North Sea, 184

tusks brought into market, 188, 189



Man contemporary with Mammoth, 189

fossil, 13

of Guadeloupe, 13



Manatees killed by cold, 230



Marsh, Prof. O. C., collection of fossil horses, 176

on Dinosaurs, 222

on toothed birds, 79, 89



Mastodon, bones taken for those of giants, 205

thought to be carnivorous, 206

covering, 210

description, 210

distribution, 203, 210, 212

extinction, 212

literature, 218

and man, 215, 216

first noticed in America, 204

origin unknown, 202

remains abundant, 208, 209

remains in Ulster and Orange counties, New York, 204, 206

restoration, 210*

[252]

Mastodon, size, 211

skeletons on exhibition, 218

species, 203

teeth, 198, 199,* 218

tusks, 199, 200



Mesohippus, 167



Mimicry, not conscious, 128



Missourium of Koch, 207,* 208



Moas, collections of, 156, 157

contemporary with man, 143, 144

deductions from distribution, 143

destruction of, 143, 144

discovery of bones, 140

elephant-footed, 142

feathers of, 141

Giant, 141

supposed food of, 142

legends of, 139, 140

literature, 158

scientific names, 146

size of, 141

species of, 141



Moloch, an Australian lizard, 100*



Mosasaurs, abundance of, in Kansas, 52

books on, 69

collections of, 68

extinction of, 56

first discovery, 50

jaw of, 54*

[253]

Mosasaurs, range of, 49

restoration, 52*

size of, 49, 50



Mylodon tracks at Carson City, 45





Names, scientific, reasons for using, xvi, xvii



Nature, balance of, 238



Nuts, fossil, 11





Oldest animals, 21

vertebrates, 19, 22



Ostrich egg, 147



Over-specialization, 221, 222





Peale, C. W., 205



Peale, Rembrandt, 205, 206



Pelican, mandible, 53



Penguins, depend on fat for warmth, 127

feathers highly modified, 128

swim with wings, 80



Petrified bodies, 10



Phororhacos, description of, 149

mistaken for mammal, 149

Patagonian bird, 148

related to heron family, 152

restoration, frontispiece

skull, 150, 151*



Protohippus, 166



[254]
Pteraspis, 28



Pterichthys, 25, 28, 32*

mistaken for crab, 25



Pterodactyls, impressions of wings, 133

from Kansas, 55

wing, 72*



Pycraft, W. P., restoration of Archæopteryx, 89





Radiolarians, 15, 17*



Reconstruction of animals, 127, 130, 134



Reptiles, fasting powers of, 98

growth throughout life, 102

jaws, 53



Restorations, xviii

Archæopteryx, 89*

Ceratosaurus, 106*

Hesperornis, 82*

Mammoth, 176*

Mastodon, 210*

Phororhacos, frontispiece

progress in, 137

Stegosaurus, 108*

Thespesius, 90*

Triceratops, 126*

Tylosaurus, 52*



Reversion of fancy stock, 171



Rhinoceros, exterminated by cold, 232



Roc, legend of, 144, 145



Rocks, thickness of sedimentary, 20



Ruffles on dresses, 202

[255]



Schuchert, Charles, on collecting fossils, 17

collector of Zeuglodon bones, 63



Seals, covering of, 128



Sea-serpent, belief in, 56

possibility of existence, 57



Shaler, Professor, on changes in Miocene flora of Europe, 236, 237



Sharks, early, 31

Great-toothed, 65

known from spines and teeth, 29

Port Jackson, 29

teeth of, 69

White, or Man-Eater, 65



Skeleton, basis of all restorations, 127

best testimony of animal's relationships, 124

information to be derived from, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127

a problem in mechanics, 102, 124

reconstruction of, 120

relation of, to exterior of animal, 121, 127

of Triceratops, 103,* 121



Spines and plates, 130



Stegosaurus, description of, 106

restoration of, 108*



Survival of the fittest, 173





Teeth, birds with, 79

of gnawing animals, 169, 200

of grass-eaters, 169

[256]

Teeth, of horse, 170

of mammoth, 198, 199*

of mastodon, 198, 199*

of sharks, 29, 30

of Thespesius, 105



Thespesius, abundance of, 104, 105

brain of, 93

(Same as Claosaurus)

engulfed in quicksand, 8

impressions of skin, 132

restoration of, 90*

teeth of, 105

at Yale, 109



Tiger, preying on reindeer, 134



Tile-fish, destruction of, 230



Titanichthys, 28, 29



Toothed birds, collections of, 88

discovery of, 79



Townsend C. H., 190-192



Tracks, ascribed to birds, 38

ascribed to giants, 45

animals known from, 41

collections of, 47

of Connecticut Valley, 37

deductions from, 44

of Dinosaurs, 38,* 40,* 41, 47*

discovery in England and America, 37, 42

how formed, 35, 40

at Hastings, 44

[257]

Tracks, of Mylodon, 46

of worms, 3, 33



Triceratops, brain, 94

broken horn, 102

description, 100, 101

restoration, 126*

skeleton, 103*



Tufa, 14



Tukeman, killing of the Mammoth, 177, 193





Variation in animals, 228



Vertebrates, oldest, 22



Vestigial structures, 201, 202



Volcanic outbursts, 231, 232





Webster, F. S., on destruction of gar pikes, 26



White, C. A., on the nature and uses of fossils, 17



White Shark, 65



Wings, 71, 72,* 73

of embryonic birds, 73



Wood, fossil, 9, 10



Worm trails, 3, 33





Yucca, fertilization, 235





Zeuglodon, abundance of remains, 60

same as Basilosaurus

description, 58, 63

habits, 59

[258]

Zeuglodon, Koch's restoration, 62

name, 58, 69

once numerous, 60

size, 58

specimen of, 68

structure of bones, 64

teeth, 58, 69*