(FEBRUARY)
Behold a strange monster our wonder engages!
If dolphin or lizard your wit may defy.
Some thirty feet long, on the shore of Lyme-Regis
With a saw for a jaw and a big staring eye.
A fish or a lizard? An Ichthyosaurus,
With a big goggle-eye and a very small brain,
And paddles like mill-wheels in chattering chorus
Smiting tremendous the dread-sounding main.
--_Professor Blackie._
SOME EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR BONES
But a farm where nothing but plants grow isn't much of a farm. Every
good farmer knows that nowadays, and so he stocks his place with horses
and cows and chickens and things. Mother Nature understood this
principle from the beginning, and the plants and animals on her farm
have always got on well together.
For one thing the plant and the animal each help the other to get its
breath. That is to say, plants, when they take in the air, keep most of
the carbon there is in it and give back most of the oxygen, which is
just what the animal world wants; while the animals, when they breathe,
keep most of the oxygen and give back most of the carbon--just the thing
that plants grow on.
But the service of the animals to the plants is very important after
they have stopped breathing altogether; since their flesh and bones,
like the dead bodies of the plants, go back to enrich their common dust.
The bones and bodies and shells of members of the animal kingdom,
however, are far richer food for soils than is dead vegetation. The
shell creatures of the sea to which we owe our wonderfully fertile
limestone soils are--many of them--so small that you can only make them
out with a microscope; while certain other contributors to our
food-supply were so big that one of them, walking down a country road,
would almost fill the road from fence to fence.
I. MR. DINOSAUR AND HIS NEIGHBORS
A STRANGE FACE IN THE MEADOW
Now let's take a look at some of these big fellows. How would you like
to have such a creature as the one at the right of this page come
ambling up to meet you at the meadow gate of an evening when you went
to milk the cows? Yet more than likely either this gentle animal, or
some of his kin, browsed over the very field where now the cattle
pasture, for he, too, was a grass-eater, and with an appetite most
hearty. If you kept him in a barn his stall would have to be eighty feet
long, and it would be necessary to fill his rack with a ton of fodder
every third day. But, assuming there was a market for him in the shape
of steaks and roasts, you would be well repaid; for, in prime condition,
he weighed twenty tons.
[Illustration: IN THE LAND OF HIS FATHERS]
These monsters who ate grass, and other monsters who ate them, and still
other monsters who lived in the sea, appeared comparatively late in the
life of the world.
[Illustration: NO WONDER HE NEVER WORRIED!
Quite aside from the fact that he had so little brain to worry with, it
seems highly improbable that the Stegosaurus ever felt any apprehension
about attacks from the rear, in the frequent military operations which
distinguished the times in which he lived. In addition to the horny
plates down his back he had those horny spines which were swung by a
tail some ten feet long.]
TONS AND TONS OF ANCIENT BONES
It is only about 15,000,000 years ago, for example, that the biggest of
them all, the Dinosaurs, lived, while the earth itself is now supposed
to be some 100,000,000 years old. Their numbers were enormous, and it is
probable there is not an acre of ground from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, and from Alaska to the tip end of South America that has not
been fertilized by their bones. In fact, of certain species I have found
the bones scattered all the way from Oregon to Patagonia; so this must
have been their pasture.
They were not only all over the land, but in the lakes and in the great
sea that once extended right through North America from the Gulf of
Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. And they were along the shores of the sea
and in the swamps. The bones of the ancestors of the whale were found
in such quantities in some of the Southern States that they were used to
build fences until it was found they were much more valuable to enrich
the fields themselves.
[Illustration: THE HEAD OF HESPERORNIS
"Then there was a great toothed, diving creature with wings. They've
named him the Hesperornis, which means 'western bird,' because the
fossils of the best-known species were found in the chalk-beds of
Kansas."]
In the great American inland sea of those days swam one kind of fierce
fish-lizard that took such big bites he had to have a hinge in his jaw.
Because of this hinge he could open his mouth wider without putting
anything out of place, don't you see? He was called the Mesosaur. But he
never bit the Archelon, who was in his crowd, because he couldn't. The
Archelon was the king of turtles, and, like all the turtle family, wore
heavy armor. He was over twelve feet long. And sharks--no end of them! A
shark at his best is bad enough, but the sharks of those days were
almost too terrible to think about. Such jaws! And teeth like railroad
spikes! Then there was a great toothed diving creature with wings.
They've named him the "Hesperornis," which means "western bird." He was
given the name because the fossils of the best-known species were found
in the chalk-beds of Kansas.
[Illustration: GREATEST OF ANCIENT FLYING MACHINES
Mr. Pterodactyl, on his way to dinner, looked like this. He was the
largest of all flying-machines before the days of the Wright brothers.
He would have measured--if there had been anybody to measure him--twenty
feet across the wings! Like the Hesperornis, he always dined on fish.]
Over the waters flew another bird-like, fish-like, bat-like thing called
the Pterodactyl. Look at his picture and you will see how he got his
nickname. It means "finger-toe." He was the largest of all
flying-machines until the days of the Wright brothers. It was over
twenty feet across his wings, from tip to tip; and, like the
Hesperornis, he always had fish for dinner.
[Illustration: A BIG "LITTLE FINGER" AND WHAT IT WAS FOR
Mr. Pterodactyl means "finger toe." What is our little finger was the
longest of his five digits. It helped support and operate that big
bat-like wing extending from his arms to his toes.]
THE EARLIEST RULERS OF THE SEA
The first monsters, like the first of almost everything else, including
the land itself, were in the sea.[5] For a time giant fish, armor-plated
like a man-of-war, and with awful appetites, just about ran everything.
Then came the reign of the sharks. Some of them had jaws that opened to
the height of a door--six feet or over. Next in succession, as rulers of
the sea, were the fish-lizards, of whom that hinge-jawed Mesosaur was
one. Of another of these fish-lizards a famous teacher of Edinburgh
University, Professor Blackie, wrote that funny verse at the head of
this chapter. The bones of this particular specimen were found sticking
out of a cliff at Lyme-Regis, a popular watering-place in the English
Channel, by a pretty English girl who was strolling along the beach.
[5] "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble."
[Illustration: A FAMILY PARTY
The imagination of the artist enables us to picture this family
party--Mrs. Ichthyosaurus and her children out for a stroll in
prehistoric waters.]
The Ichthyosaurus, as Professor Blackie says in his verse, was some
thirty feet long, with a comparatively large head--like an
alligator's--set close to his body. Another fish-lizard, well and
unfavorably known by his neighbors of the sea, was the Plesiosaurus.
Instead of fins he had big paddles resembling those of the seal. He was
a kind of side-wheeler, like the Mississippi River steamboats, and he
could go like everything! His neck was long and he darted after the
smaller creatures he lived on.
REIGN OF THE LIZARD FAMILY
But these queer fish seem to have just been getting ready to land; for,
by being lizards, they after a while managed it. A lizard, you know,
belongs to the reptile family, and out of these sea reptiles there
grew, in course of time, reptiles which lived, not in the sea but in the
swamps along the sea. These reptiles were the Dinosaurs, and they are
related to the Minosaurs and the Ichthyosaurus, and the rest of the
Saurs, as you can see by the family name; for "saur" means lizard.
Dinosaur means "terrible lizard." Don't you think he looks it?
Although some of these Dinosaurs were no larger than chickens, others
were by far the largest creatures that ever were, on sea or land. Many
of the biggest lived on grass, just like an old cow, while the
flesh-eating Dinosaurs lived on them. Some of these Dinosaurs went on
all fours, while others ran about on their hind legs, and when they
stood still, propped themselves up on their big, thick tails as do
kangaroos. The Camptosaurus, one of whose favorite resorts was the land
that is now Wyoming, was thirty feet long. Another called the
Brontosaurus, was sixty feet long. The Atlantosaurus, one of the
pioneers of Colorado, measured eighty feet from the end of his nose to
the end of his tail, and all of them were built in proportion. The
Stegosaurus, also an early settler in Wyoming, had huge bony plates,
like ploughshares, sticking out all along his back from the nape of his
neck to the end of his tail. He seems to have gone about looking quite
ugly and humpbacked, as our old cat does when she has words with the
dog.
After the swamps dried up and the lizards could no longer make a living,
came the reign of the mammals; including the Mastodons and the Mammoths,
marching in countless herds, trumpeting through the forests.
HOW SOME MONSTERS PLOUGHED THE FIELD
But besides what they did in the way of fertilizing the land with their
flesh and bones some of the mammals did a good deal of ploughing. Among
these early ploughmen were the Mastodons and the Mammoths, and another
elephant-like creature with two tusks, that he wore, not after the
fashion among elephants to-day, but curving down from his chin, somewhat
like Uncle Sam's goatee. He used these tusks, it is supposed, not only
for self-defense, but for grubbing up roots which he ate. If so, they
must have been about as good ploughs as those crooked sticks that were
used by the early farmers among men, and that are still in use among
primitive peoples.
THE ELEPHANT FAMILY AS PLOUGHMEN
What makes it more likely that the creature with the down-curving tusks
stirred the soil with them is that his cousins, the elephants of to-day,
are themselves great ploughmen. Elephants feed, not only on grass and
the tender shoots of trees, but on bulbs buried in the soil, which they
hunt out by their fine sense of smell. In digging these bulbs they turn
up whole acres of ground. Elephants also do a great deal of ploughing by
uprooting trees so as to make it more convenient to get at their tender
tops. Sir Samuel Baker, the explorer, says the work done by a herd of
elephants in a mimosa forest in this way is very great and that trees
over four feet in circumference are uprooted. In the case of the biggest
trees several elephants work together, some pulling the tree with their
trunks, while others dig under the roots with their tusks. To be sure,
the mimosa-trees have no tap roots, but tearing them out of the ground
is no small job, nevertheless. It takes strength and it takes
engineering.
Another early ploughman was a bird, the Moa. The Moa had no wings, but
his muscular legs were simply enormous, and so were his feet. New
Zealand seems to have been the headquarters of the Moas. There used to
be loads of them as shown by the huge deposits of their bones. They are
supposed to have been killed in countless numbers during the Ice Ages in
the Southern Hemisphere; for there were Ice Ages in the Southern as
well as the Northern Hemisphere. In one great morass in New Zealand
abounding in warm springs, bones of the Moas were found in such
countless numbers, layer upon layer, that it is thought the big birds
gathered at these springs to keep warm during those great freezes.
THE MILLSTONES OF THE MOAS
Besides the work they did with feet and bills you may imagine how much
nice fresh stone the Moas must have ground up in their crops during the
millions of years they existed. It was a regular mill--the gizzard of a
Moa--full of pebbles as big as hickory nuts. Scattered about the springs
where their bones are found are little heaps of these pebbles, each the
contents of a gizzard. Like miniature tumuli, they mark the spots where
the bodies of the Moas returned to dust.
Perhaps some of those flesh-eating Dinosaurs did a little ploughing once
in a while, too; for one theory is that those ridiculous little arms
were used for scratching out a nest for the eggs, just as the crocodiles
and the alligators and the turtles dig nests for their eggs to-day. For
all these animals, as did the Dinosaurs, belong to the reptile family,
and show the family trait of digging out nests for their eggs.
[Illustration: A PUZZLE PAGE FROM THE GREAT STONE BOOK
Talk about your cut-out puzzles! Here is a specimen of the kind of
puzzle Nature and the course of things in the darkest ages of world
history have cut out for the paleontologists. It is a find of ancient
bones in the asphalt deposits near Los Angeles.]
Although the Dinosaurs roamed the swamps and lowlands of all the ancient
world, their favorite resort was the territory now occupied by our
Western States--judging from the quantities of bones they left--while
that old Mediterranean Sea of ours was full of their kin, the
sea-lizards. Professor Marsh, of Yale, who was among the first
explorers of the graves of these monarchs of the past, says that one
day, while riding through a valley in the Rocky Mountains, he saw the
bones of no less than seven sea-lizards staring at him from the cliffs.
Yet, only here and there by the wearing through of the rocks by flowing
streams has nature opened up these vast mausoleums, the mountains and
the cliffs. What enormous quantities of bones, then, must still be
buried there, what tons and tons must have given their lime and
phosphate to the soil. So you see this story of old bones, even from a
farming standpoint, is no light matter.
[Illustration: HOW THE WISE MEN ANSWER THE PUZZLES
By their marvellous skill and their knowledge of the mechanics of
monster anatomy the paleontologists fit one bone fragment to another,
supply the missing parts in artificial material, and behold! the
monsters take their places in the long procession of the ages. There has
been nothing equal to it since the vision of the prophet in the Valley
of Dry Bones. (Ezekiel 37:1-10.)]
II. HOW THE MONSTERS DIED AND RETURNED TO DUST
"But you said these monsters lived in the sea and in swamps. Then how,
in the name of common sense, did their bones get up into the mountains?"
WHEN THE INLAND SEA WENT DRY
Well, it's like this: As I said a while back, in the days of the monster
fish and the monster lizards, there was a great sea reaching clear from
the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, and with swamps along the
borders extending far into lands that afterward became the Rocky
Mountains. When the land began to rise, due to the shrinking of the
earth--a thing that has been going on ever since the earth was born--the
sea and the swamps went dry, and far to the west the land wrinkled up
into the Rocky Mountains. In these layers of rock that made the
mountains were the bones of the monsters that had died when the rocks
were still mud, in the swamps and along the borders of the inland sea.
Not only did the land under the western portion of the sea slowly rise
until the waters were completely closed in on the west, and the sea thus
made that much narrower, but the rise of the land on the south cut off
connection with the great salt ocean which surrounds the continents
to-day. So the salt-water fish, for lack of salt water, died, and with
them the monsters like the Ichthyosaurus that lived on the salt-water
fish that lived in this salt sea.
But it wasn't alone that the seas grew narrower and more shallow because
of the elevation of the lands. The mountains rising in the west, cut off
the rain-laden winds which blew from the Pacific in those days just as
they do now. Thus the seas dried up so much the faster. But first,
before the sea went entirely dry, its place was taken by the lakes and
swamps into which it shrivelled up. Low, swampy land is just what
reptiles like, so this was their Golden Age, just as the previous time
of the wide, deep sea was the Golden Age of the big fish and the
fish-lizards.
Then, as the land still rose and the climate grew dryer, the reptiles
passed away, and in came the mammal family, to which the cows and the
horses and the cats and the kittens, and all the rest of us, belong.
[Illustration: THE TIGER WITH THE SABRE TEETH
Tigers like this lived ages ago in both the Old World and the New. They
had canine teeth, curved like a sabre, in the upper jaw.]
TOO MUCH BRAWN, TOO LITTLE BRAIN
Of course, even where they didn't die with their boots on, so to speak,
as so many of them did in those lawless days, there came a time for each
monster, in the order of nature, when he drew his last breath. But what
seems so strange is that all these monsters--the biggest and strongest
of them--entirely disappeared and left no descendants![6] The whole of
the mystery has not been unravelled yet, even by the wise men of
science, but still they have learned a good deal. For one thing, they
know that most of the reptiles and the fish-lizards disappeared because
so much of the land where they lived went dry. They had to get a new
boarding-place, and there wasn't any to get! Another thing was that
these big fellows, although they _were_ so big, and got along finely
while everything was just so, had so little brain they couldn't change
their habits to meet new conditions, as our closer and cleverer cousins,
the mammals, did. Why, do you know that one of these monsters, who was
twenty-five feet long if he was an inch, and twelve feet high, had a
brain no bigger than a man's fist? All the monsters of those days were
like that--tons of bone and muscle, but a very small supply of brains.
[6] That is to say, no descendants worthy of them. It is now thought
some of the modern reptiles may be degenerate descendants of the big
reptiles of old.
So when things went against them, they just had to give up, and, like a
queer dream, they faded away. But their history makes one of the most
interesting chapters in the whole wonderful story of the dust.
Of all the live stock that have fed on the great world-farm and helped
enrich it with their bones, these animals were surely the strangest that
ever were seen!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
"But since these monsters passed away many millions of years ago,
and all that is usually found is a piece of them here and there,
how do the men of science know so much about them--how they looked,
and how they ate, and how they treated one another?"
That's a good question. It _does_ seem strange. Why, to hear them
talk, you'd suppose these men, learned in ancient bones, had
actually _met_ the monsters! And, speaking of meeting them, I must
tell you a little story. It's a good story and it will answer your
question.
Baron Cuvier, one of the most famous of the paleontologists, awoke
from a deep sleep to see standing by his bed a strange, hairy
creature with horns and hoofs. And it said:
"Cuvier! Cuvier! I have come to eat you!" But the baron, taking in
the form of the monster at a glance, only laughed.
"Horns and hoofs? You can't. You're a grain-eater!"
See the point? The baron argued that because the monster had horns
and hoofs he must be a grain-eater; for all creatures with both
horns and hoofs are grain-eaters. This particular creature, to be
sure, was an eater of both meat and grain--being one of Cuvier's
students who was trying to play a trick on him. But the principle
holds good. The scientists, _knowing_ one thing, _infer_ another.
Because animals with both horns and hoofs eat no meat Cuvier knew
his visitor couldn't eat _him_, even if he'd been real and not just
made up.
For another instance, take our queer old friend that Professor
Blackie wrote the funny rhyme about--the Ichthyosaurus "with a saw
for a jaw and a big staring eye." The scientists figure, just from
looking into the hollow socket where the eye used to be, that he
could see at night like a cat--and right through muddy water, too;
that he spent most of his time in shallows near the shore; that it
didn't make any difference to him whether a fish was near or far,
provided it wasn't too far, of course, for he could see it and catch
it, just the same. They also said--these learned men, after peering
into the dark hollow where that remarkable eye used to be--that Mr.
Ichthyosaurus spent a great deal of time diving and a great deal of
time with his homely face just above the surface of the water.
Why they could reason all this from a hollow eye socket and some
bony, flexible plates around the outer edge of it, you will see by
referring to such books as "Animals of the Past," by F. A. Lucas,
director of the American Museum of Natural History; "Creatures of
Other Days" and "Extinct Monsters," by Hutchinson; "Extinct
Animals," by Lankester; "Mighty Animals," by Mix; the chapter "When
the World was Young," in Lang's "Red Book of Animal Stories," and
"Restoring Prehistoric Monsters" in "Uncle Sam, Wonder Worker," by
Du Puy.
Here are some more conclusions they draw from certain facts. See how
near you can come to reasoning them out for yourself before looking
them up in the books that tell.
Why it is supposed the Dinosaurs swam like Crocodiles. (Look at the
picture of Mr. I., and pay _particular_ attention to his tail.)
Why it is they say that the sea-lizards with long necks must have
had small heads.
Why it is argued that because the Mesosaurus had a hinge in his jaw
he must have had a big, loose, baggy throat.
"Keeping Up the Soil," in "The Country Life Reader," deals with the
subject of the use of fertilizers on the farm--how easy it is to
waste them, how easy it is to save them, and how important it is
that they should be saved; while the article on "Acid Soils" tells
how the lime in the bones of the monsters has helped keep the soil
from getting "sour stomach," and also how they unlocked the potash
and phosphorus in the soil so that the plants could get at them.
[Illustration: FERTILE FIELDS THAT RODE ON THE WIND
The winds that now help grow the corn and wheat on these broad fields by
carrying the pollen from one plant to another, also brought the soil on
which they grew. These are the loess plains of Nebraska. There are
42,000 acres of them.]