By permission of the American Museum of Natural History
Restoration of an aquatic Dinosaur, Brontosaurus excelsus, from the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous of Wyoming. The animal in life was over 60 feet long
By permission of the American Museum of Natural History
Restoration of the small carnivorous Dinosaur, Ornitholestes hermanui, catching a primitive bird Archæopteryx. Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous
The mastodon was about the size of an elephant, with massive limbs, and large, heavy head that bore two stout, up-curved tusks of ivory. The creature moved in herds like the buffalo from swamp to swamp; and old age coming on, the individual, unable to keep up with the herd, sank to his death in the boggy ground. The peat accumulated over his bones, undisturbed until thousands of years elapse, and the chance digging of a well discovers his skeleton.
Frozen in the ice of northern Siberia, near the mouths of rivers, a number of mammoths have been found. These are creatures of the elephant family, and belonging to the extinct race that lived in the Quaternary Period, just succeeding the Tertiary. The ice overtook the specimens, and they have been in cold storage ever since. For this reason, both flesh and bones are preserved, a rare thing to happen, and rarer still to be seen by a scientist.
The ignorant natives made a business of watching the ice masses at the river mouth for dark spots that showed where a mammoth was encased in the ice. If an iceberg broke off near such a place, the sun might thaw the ice front of the glacier, until the hairy monster could at length be reached. His long hair served for many uses, and the wool that grew under the hair was used as a protection from the Arctic winter. The frozen flesh was eaten; the bones carved into useful tools; but the chief value of the find was in the great tusks of ivory, that curved forward and pointed over the huge shoulders. It was worth a fortune to get a pair and sell them to a buyer from St. Petersburg.
One of the finest museum specimens of the mammoth was secured by buying the tusks of the dealer, and by his aid tracing the location of the carcass, which was found still intact, except that dogs had eaten away part of one foreleg, bone and all. From this carefully preserved specimen, models have been made, exactly copying the shape and the size of the animal, its skin, hair, and other details.
The sabre-toothed tiger, the sharp tusks of which, six to eight inches long, made it a far more ferocious beast than any modern tiger of tropical jungles, was a Quaternary inhabitant of Europe and America. So was a smaller tiger, and a lion. The Irish elk, which stood eleven feet high, with antlers that spread ten feet apart at the tips, was monarch in the deer family, which had several different species on both continents. Wild horses and wild cattle, one or two of great size, roamed the woods, while rhinos and the hippopotamus kept near the water-courses. Hyenas skulked in the shadows, and acted as scavengers where the great beasts of prey had feasted. Sloths and cuirassed animals, like giant armadillos, lived in America. Among bears was one, the cave bear, larger than the grizzly. True monkeys climbed the trees. Flamingo, parrots, and tall secretary birds followed the giant gastornis, the ancestor of wading birds and ostriches, which stood ten feet high, but had wings as small and useless as the auk of later times.
With the entrance of the modern types of trees, came other flowering plants, and with them the insects that live on the nectar of flowers. Through a long line of primitive forms, now extinct, flowering plants and their insect friends conform to modern types. The record is written in the great stone book.