Tyrannosaurus, the tyrant saurian, greatest of flesh-eating giants, about to attack a family of Triceratops, “they of the three-horned face.”
“Weren’t there any fish big enough to give him a fight?”
“H’m, hardly,” the scientist replied meditatively. “Still, there was the Portheus Molossus, of course.”
“The what?” asked the boy. “I haven’t ever heard of him.”
“The bulldog fish,” his uncle explained. “Oh, Portheus was able to give a good account of himself. He had a head a little larger than that of a grizzly bear, with jaws even deeper than a bear’s in proportion to their length. The teeth stood about three inches above the gums, tiger-like, but, of course, they were fish teeth, much more slender and a great deal sharper. He had two rows of teeth which crossed each other, and even an Agathosaurus would have had trouble shaking off a Portheus if the fish took a fast hold on his snaky neck.”
“I wish I could see a scrap like that now,” exclaimed Perry regretfully.
“You were born about three million years too late,” was the reply, “for it’s fully as long ago since the saurians left. They were the strangest army, Perry, that ever trod the earth, some of them monsters of ferocity and terrible to look on, such as the Tyrannosaurus, which, as you can see, means the Tyrant Saurian, but most of them were slow, lumbering, and inoffensive. Of true quickness and agility they had none.
“Over earth and air and sea, they were the masters. In the shallow seas they ruled with an iron hand; they filled great shells like turtles with a bulk vaster than has been seen since; they reared themselves on towering hind limbs like colossal kangaroos, their monstrous tails swinging free behind them; they donned fantastic armor, with spikes and horns, and living saws upon their backs, such as outdid the wildest imaginations of man; they even rose into the air and filled it with the flying dragons, as though to make fairy tales believable.
“From Australia to the Arctic Circle the whole world was in their grip, and one can almost picture two of the great monsters thinking, in their sluggish way, of the impossibility that their mighty lordship should ever come to an end. I say ‘almost,’ Perry, for you know that these creatures had very little brain. A monster weighing thirty tons, like the Brontosaurus, had only one-quarter as much true brain as an ape of to-day. They could hardly think at all. Yet, in some brute way, they knew that they had nothing but each other to be afraid of. The enemy that should conquer them they did not know.
