_Property of the American Museum of Natural History_
The Brontosaurus (herbivorous dinosaur)
[LINK TO IMAGE]

The name dinosaur, meaning terrible lizard, represents an order of fossil reptiles. They are allied to the crocodile, but, like the kangaroo, their hind legs were much longer than their front ones. The neck and tail were very long and the body short but of immense size. These monsters were from twenty to eighty feet in length and weighed from thirty to one hundred tons. The long, slender neck supported a small head that contained a correspondingly small brain, from which it is thought that the creature possessed a low order of intelligence. The tail was much thicker than the neck and in some species was flattened. When rising on its hind legs and resting on its tail it could look into the window of a four-story building. Some of these strange animals had bills like those of a duck; some possessed teeth for grinding and others sharp teeth for tearing. These were by far the largest land animals that ever lived. The different species often waged titanic battles with one another for the supremacy of the earth.

It is conjectured that their disappearance was due to violent upheavals of the earth, to the draining of the water, to changes of climate, and to deprivation of suitable food.

The mounted brontosaur in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, will enable one better to appreciate the size of these giants of the ancient world. This typical specimen, though not the largest found, is sixty-seven feet long and stands fifteen and one-half feet high. Its neck measures thirty feet in length and its tail eighteen. The body weighed about ninety tons. This huge fossil, enclosed in its stone matrix, was sent from the quarry to the museum. After it had been received two men were employed constantly for nearly two and one-half years in removing the matrix, repairing, and mounting the fossil.

Let us turn now to the burying ground of a giant forest. Long, long years ago, before man appeared on the earth, an inland sea occupied what is now the northeastern part of Arizona. It was a sea bordered with sandstone and surrounded by coniferous forests, where stately trees nodded in the breezes.

At length there came a great change. The rim of the basin gave way, and the great volume of water, freed from restraint, overwhelmed the forest with earthy material, prostrating and burying it deep beneath the flood of sand.

In time the woody structure disappeared, and was replaced by beautifully stained opal and agate. Again, in the lapse of time the old forest bed was once more lifted above its former level, forming a mesa, or plateau, of considerable extent. During subsequent ages, the elements scarred and furrowed the plateau, forming canyons, gulches, valleys, and buttes, thus revealing in part this ancient forest. Could these dead trees but talk, how interesting would be their story! We can read their history but imperfectly by examining the mutilated breast of Mother Earth, in and on which lie these mute stone trees, dead yet made more beautiful through their transformation.