The question staggered Perry, for he did not know. He thought for a moment, and then remembered that all water-dwelling reptiles came up to the surface to breathe, so he answered:
“I’m not sure, Uncle George, but I don’t think any of them have.”
“They haven’t,” was the crisp correction. “How, then, could any of them be living in the bottom of the sea?”
The scientist snorted impatiently and paced the deck.
“There’s a lot of foolish talk,” he continued, after a few minutes’ pause, “about some race of fossil monsters having continued to the present time, as though, at almost any time, one might happen to come across an Agathosaurus at sea, or a Tyrannosaurus on land. There are, of course, a few survivals, such as the shrimp-like Nebalia, which goes back to the Cambrian Period, to the very beginning of life, but all these survivals are small and inconspicuous. And Agathosaurus of the Cretaceous Period certainly wasn’t inconspicuous!”
“Just how big was the Agathosaurus?” queried the boy.
“Big enough to satisfy any sea-serpent-hunter,” was the reply. “The Agathosaurus had a neck thirty feet long and a body as large as that of a small elephant, with powerful limbs turned into swimming paddles. This long neck, with its small head and sharp-toothed jaws, must have worked havoc with the fish of the Jurassic seas.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived.