EXTINCT MONSTERS.
THE last sixteen or eighteen years have seen a very large addition to our knowledge of types of animal life no longer existing, and many readers will be grateful to Mr. H. N. Hutchinson for his attempt to sum up recent dis- coveries and to place them side by side, in the compass of a single book, with descriptions of monsters which time has made rather more familiar. He has succeeded in doing this in a volume entitled "Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days" (Chapman and Hall, 10s. 6d. net), which those who know his former work will perceive is a combination and condensation of previous volumes, with the records of the last two decades added. Certainly the later discoveries which he chronicles are not the least interesting or important. The evolution of the horse, as Mr. Hutchinson says, is " quite an. old story now," but the drawings which have been made for this volume, and which have been placed in a kind of ladder-diagram, illustrate more clearly than any story could the ascent of the horse from the hyracotherium, a pretty little creature some fourteen inches high, with four toes to each of its feet, to the equus caballus, the horse we know to-day. There are six stages definitely traceable in fossil remains. The hyracotherium comes first, as regards complete or almost complete skeletons, though he is not the earliest type ; that is the eohippns, or " dawn-horse," which was perhaps about eleven inches high. After the hyraco- therium comes the orohippas, a bigger animal, and then the mesohippus, which has dropped a finger or toe and has a larger skull. The next development is the protohippus, whose centre digit has become much bigger than the other two, and then the pliohippns or hipparion, who grew his centre digit almost into a single hoof, with small digits at the side; last of all, our own horse, with just the splint bones remaining to show what once were his fingers.
The evolution of the elephant has become equally plain, thanks mainly to the searches made in Egypt by Dr. C. W. Andrews. In the district known as the Fayam his discoveries enabled him to decide the fascinating problem of how the elephant got his trunk. The elephant begins as the moeritherinm, who takes his name from the old Egyptian Lake Meeris. According to Dr. Andrews, the moeritherium was about the size and shape of a tapir, and probably used to live in the marshes of the middle eocene period. The next stage is the palaeomastodon, a beast with a forehead sloping much more sharply upwards, its nose and cheeks pushed forward, and its lower jaw much elongated. Perhaps the tip of its snout was prehensile. Next comes the tetrabelon, whose upper incisors have become enormous, and whose nose and lower jaw are even longer than the palaeomastodon's. Then, apparently, the tetrabelon discovered that it did not need to use its lower jaw, but could pull herbage with its snout alone; so its chin suddenly (as aeons go) shrivelled, and its long, toothless face was left without the support of a lower jaw; it had turned into the flexible proboscis of the elephant.
The beat kncwn of recent discoveries among the dinosaurs,
the " terrible lizards," is of course the huge diplodocus carnegii, eighty-four and a half feet long. Our sense of proportion as regards huge animals does not supply us with sufficient imagina- tion really to picture such a beast. Man did not exist in the age of dinosaurs, and his mind, therefore, cannot even retain a memory descending through past generations of such animals as these. The biggest elephant in our Zoological Gardens is nine feet high, and she looks enormous; but the diplodocus could lift his head fourteen feet high, and had twenty- eight yards of neck, body, and tail to take about with him. A railway train is perhaps as near such a body in motion as we can imagine, and possibly some of the noises made by a railway engine would be not unlike the sounds made by a dinosaur breathing or calling to its mate. Science, unfortunately, can never recover for ns the sounds, even if it can reproduce the sights, of prehistoric ages. As regards mere appearance, the diplodocus was especially remarkable for its size, but its shape was nothing very extraordinary. An exaggerated eft, with a. body carried much higher, and a very long neck, would make a diplodocus. A stranger form was the dinosaur which has been named the polacanthus fori, an armed or spired monster, also one of those comparatively newly discovered. He is allied to the stegosaurus ungulates, a massive animal some twenty-five feet long, with a back covered with large triangular pointed plates, to protect it against carnivorous enemies, and a tail armed with spines arranged like a succession of pitchforks, with which it could deal a fearful blow, even at animals accustomed to feed on twenty-five-foot dinosaurs. But neither the pole,- canthus, the many-spired, or the stegosaurus, the roofed or sheltered lizard, is quite so odd as a monster recently put together from a number of skulls and vertebrae by the late Professor Marsh and others. The oddest is the gigantic triceratops, the three-horned herbivorous dinosaur who, accord- ing to those who have studied him most closely, developed his weapons of offence along lines which eventually killed him. He had a skull some seven or eight feet in length, and altogether measured nearly twenty feet from nose to tail; but his horns were the wonderful feature. Two great excrescences stuck out like the horns of a snail, only pointed, and there was another sharp horn on the nose, like that of a rhinoceros; underneath this horn was a huge beak-like month something like a toucan's bill. Professor Marsh's theory is that the tendency with the triceratops was to develop the horn and the bony plates on its head until, as generations went on, the head actually got too much for the fore-legs and the body to bear, and so this specialisation in horn-growing led to the extinction of the race.
The story of the evolution of birds has been helped only a little by recent discoveries. The question of the date or the stage at which there first appeared feathered creatures with the habits and appearance of birds as we know them is one which remains to be solved. To the solution of that question not much has been contributed in recent years ; nothing to compare in importance with the first discovery of the famous archaeopteryx, the oldest-known fossil bird. Mr. Hutchinson in his book gives us Mr. W. P. Pycraft's restora- tion of the archaeopteryx, from its skeleton, with the feathers of the wings and tail impressed on the Jurassic mud, to the complete feathered bird sitting clasping a branch and opening its bilL Its jaws are toothed, its tail has its feathers set on it in something like the fiat arrangement of the hairs on the brush of a squirrel, and altogether it is a strangely anomalous type of creature. But we should expect to know less about extinct birds than beasts, particularly the smaller birds, and the archaeopteryx was only the size of a rook. Of the larger, monstrous birds, such as the
moa, the fourteen-foot wingless giant of New Zealand, and the aepyornis nuzzimus of Madagascar, which was
probably quite as big, we know a certain amount from their bones. Eggs of the aepyornis have been found in recent years in the mud of Madagascar swamps. But of the
smaller types we can hope to find little. Small birds would be light, and would not fall or sink heavily into mud which would preserve them as fossils. It they fell on the water or on land, they would be more likely to be eaten by some other larger creature, rather than be preserved for us to stare at their skeletons. The problem of the extinct small bird, and the evolution, in particular, of the power of singing in small birds, is one which awaits solution, and perhaps never may get it.
Does there exist, possibly, in some pathless, central swamp or jungle in unexplored South America or Africa some monster surviving from these dim ages of the aepyornis and the dinosaur P It was not ten years ago, it may be remem- bered, that Mr. Hesketh Prichard set out on an expedition to discover, if possible, the giant sloth of Patagonia. The giant sloth belongs by right to the age of monsters, for he stood eighteen feet high. But he certainly survived into the age of man, for his remains have been found in a cave with human bones ; there were even pieces of sloth's skin which showed the marks of tools. Masses of out grass were found in the same cave; possibly this particular sloth had been fastened up in the cave until his owner wanted him to eat. But Mr. Hesketh Prichard was unsuccessful ; the giant sloth did not reveal himself alive. Another believer in the existence of monsters generally assumed to be extinct is Mr. Carl Hagenbeck, the great animal collector. He has heard from African natives of an enormous monster, half elephant, half dragon, which inhabits the impene- trable swamps of the interior of Rhodesia. He is not sceptical; he is bold enough to hope that Africa still holds a dinosaur. But it is to be feared that the balance of probabilities is against him. Wherever you meet tribes of natives far from civilisation you get the same tale of mythical, monstrous beasts to be discovered by the traveller if only he is bold enough to push sufficiently deep into the forest or the swamp. It is our own fairy-tale of dragons surviving in its natural, original form, and probably as easily explained. A big crocodile or rhinoceros heard or half seen in virgin jungle would be enough to people all the land and water beyond it with dinosaurs.
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