“The sea must have swarmed with Zeuglodons, Uncle George,” said Perry, breaking silence when at last the sand-dunes were crossed and they were in the famous valley itself.
“Apparently it did,” was the reply, “for Zeuglodons had a wide distribution. Thousands of specimens have been found in our Southern States, showing that, in those times, the Gulf of Mexico was a great deal larger than it is to-day. So thickly scattered were these bones on southern farms that foundations—for example like those of corn cribs—have been made of the vertebræ of Zeuglodons.”
“They must have been whacking big,” said Perry, looking at the section of a backbone that protruded above the ground. “Bigger than anything we’ve got to-day.”
“No, not as big as whales,” the scientist corrected him. “Few Zeuglodons were more than fifty feet long.”
“Still, fifty feet isn’t bad.”
“Fifty feet is a good length,” the professor agreed. “And Zeuglodon was a queer-looking beast. It’s hard to realize that he could have had so large a proportion of tail to so small a body and head. The Zeuglodon’s head was only about four feet long, the body wasn’t over ten, and it lugged forty feet of tail behind.”
“Regular sea-serpent,” commented the boy. “I don’t suppose the tail was very big through?”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Zeuglodon, the Primitive Whale.