A more probable explanation, judging from the shape of the skin outline which covers the abdomen and is sunken into the body cavity at least a foot, is that the great creature died in the water. The gases forming in the body floated the carcass, which was then carried by currents to the final burial place. When the gases escaped, the skin collapsed and occupied their place; the carcass sank head first and feet upward, the former dragging under the shoulder as the body came to rest on the mud of the bottom.
Quite different indeed is this grand example of extinct life from the one restored and of which an ideal picture is given in this book (Fig. [46]). In the first place, in the specimen we discovered the ribs are expanded, the great chest cavity measuring 18 inches deep, 24 inches long, and 30 inches wide. I have no doubt but that with lungs expanded to their full capacity, he often swam across streams of water in the tropical jungle in which he lived and died. Further, the front limbs are not mere arms, that never touched the ground, but were used in locomotion, as there are toes with hoof-bones, not so large as those of the hind feet but with the same pattern, and a divergent thumb, that had a round bone for its ungual. Consequently the animal could use the front feet as clumsy hands to hold down the limb of a tree from which he was cropping the tender foliage, or banners of moss. There were three powerful hoofs on each hind foot.
I do not question, in the presence of this individual, which is complete excepting the hind feet, tail and left tibia and fibula, but that the reptile often stood erect, supporting his ponderous weight while feeding on the leaves of the forest. But when it walked it used its front limbs as well. A remarkable character are the countless rods of solid bone that lay along the backbone in the flesh, and appear like ossified tendons similar to those in the leg of a turkey. Hundreds of ossified rods appeared, row after row, shaped like Indian beads, as thick as a lead pencil in the center and beveled off to a small round point. It has occurred to me that these were for defense; that when a great Tyrannosaurus rex leaped on his back, his powerful claws found no lodgment in the flesh on account of these bony rods that could not be penetrated. Thus our dinosaur would shake off his enemy.
How wonderful are the works of an Almighty hand! The life that now is, how small a fraction of the life that has been! Miles of strata, mountain high, are but the stony sepulchers of the life of the past.
How rapidly has the field expanded which I entered as a pioneer some forty years ago! In 1867 I knew only five paleontologists—Agassiz, Lesquereux, Marsh, Cope, and Leidy, with but few followers; while to-day, Harvard, Princeton, the American, the Carnegie, the Field, and the National Museums have all built up great collections of the animals and plants of the past, and the number of publications on fossil animals has reached an enormous total.
I had the pleasure of attending the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that met in the American Museum in New York at the mid-winter session in 1906. Professor Osborn introduced me to his splendid Head Preparator, Mr. Hermann, who has mounted the skeletons of the great Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, and so many other examples of extinct animals. Mr. Hermann was requested by the Professor to devote all his spare time to showing me anything the exhibition and storerooms contained, prepared or unprepared, and to do all in his power to make my visit pleasant. I certainly felt at home in that paradise of ancient animals, many of which I had collected for science on my own explorations. The magnificent halls in which they are exhibited are a wonderful tribute paid by the wealth and intelligence of the citizen of Greater New York to science. How admirable that Mr. Jesup should use his private fortune as the means to take from the obscurity of the private dwelling of the late Professor Cope his great collection, to which I was a contributor for eight years; and he has placed it under Professor Henry F. Osborn, who with the assistance of Drs. J. L. Wortman, W. D. Matthew, and others, has brought order out of chaos and presented in intelligible shape not only that collection but many others from the fossil fields of the West.
It is a glorious thought to me that I have lived to see my wildest dreams come true, that I have seen stately halls rise to be graced with many of the animals of the past that lived in countless thousands, and that I have had the pleasure of securing some of the treasures, in the shape of complete skeletons, which now adorn those halls.
I stood on Columbia Heights that same year of 1906, and my heart swelled with pride when I looked down on that teeming metropolis and remembered that I too was a native of the Empire State. Then I thought of my distant prairie state of Kansas, and gloried in the thought that the best years of my life had been spent in her ancient ocean and lake beds, those old cemeteries of creation.
That past life, at least a very small fraction of it, I have sought to bring before my readers with pen pictures. We have men among us who can put their conceptions of the ancient inhabitants of land and sea and air on canvas, and among them are Mr. Charles R. Knight, of the American Museum, and Mr. Sidney Prentice, of the Carnegie Museum. Mr. Prentice I knew as a boy, and he has done me the honor to assure me that my words of counsel have done something at least toward assisting him to make the choice of following the work not only of an artist in a paleontological museum, but in portraying with pencil and brush the ideal pictures of the early denizens of earth as in life. His success is shown in his restorations of Clidastes. The results of Mr. Knight’s restorations of many of the extinct animals brighten my pages, thanks to my friend Professor Henry F. Osborn, so if I have failed in my pen pictures to take my readers into the misty past, these brilliant restorations will certainly have the desired effect.