“The Beaked Dinosaurs were in that Bone Cabin hillock and in the beds below by dozens. There were two or three species of the Camptosaurus, one quite small, only three or four feet high, another six or seven feet high, but both of them much smaller than their gigantic relative, the Iguanodon, which lived about the same time in Western Europe. There were those super-dreadnoughts of the dinosaur world, the short-legged Stegosaurus, built for impregnable defense, with feet like elephants, short neck, small head, and a body and tail armored with massive bony plates and large spines.”
“Ah,” said Perry, remembering his dream, “it was a Stegosaur that saved me!”
His uncle stared at him, not in the least understanding the remark, but continued:
“Then, too, there were carnivorous dinosaurs of two kinds, one a small agile beast, Ornitholestes, some six feet in length, and the other the terrible Allosaurus, a giant flesh eater, thirty-eight feet long, with bird-like feet and huge jaws armed with pointed teeth sharp as a knife and great curved talons. Not only did we find the skulls and skeletons of these beasts, but also significant evidence of their habits. The bones of the herbivorous dinosaurs, even of the Brontosaurus, were not uncommonly scored with the tooth-marks of the Allosaurus, whose broken-off teeth sometimes lay beside them in the quarry. So you see that among these Jurassic Dinosaurs there was the same division into hunters and prey that one sees everywhere in Nature. There, as everywhere else, the hunters developed weapons for attack—teeth and claws; while the hunted animals either developed some kind of armor or weapons of defense; others, again, developed means of speed for flight from their foes, or retreated to some inaccessible place for safety. The carnivora, in turn, were trying out improvements in method of capturing and attacking their prey.”
“Same old fight!” exclaimed the boy.
“You can see the fight even more impressively in the Cretaceous Period, some millions of years later than the Bone Cabin dinosaurs. By that time the huge but clumsy and helpless amphibious dinosaurs had become extinct. The unarmored Camptosaurus, Iguanodonts and their relatives had taken to the water as swimmers rather than waders, and had become the Duck-billed dinosaurs, with rows of small teeth behind a duck-like bill, web feet and a powerful swimming tail.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Trachodon, a Duck-Billed Dinosaur.
Reptile, sixteen feet high, alarmed by the approach of a huge carnivorous Tyrannosaurus, ready to plunge into the water for safety.