EXTINCT MONSTERS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 225, 28 January 1911, Page 10

EXTINCT MONSTERS

THE ORIGINALS OF THE DRAGON. Once again the report comes from Africa that terrible monsters hitherto unknown to naturalists inhabit the hot swamps am. jungles of the unexplored interior. This time it is in the form of a letter from Charles Brooks, explorer, scientist, and hunter, of Joliannesburg. Mr. Brooks writes that natives of the swamps of Northern Rhodesia along the southern borders' of the Sahara Desert have told him of creatures so big that beside them "elephants look like small cats." It is less than a year since Carl Hagenbeck, the famous animal trainer and merchant, astonished the scientific world by asserting in his book "Beasts and men" that the natives have described to him a "huge monster, half-beast, halfdragon," which inhabited these very swamps. Traveller and explorer to the contrary, however, no man who values his scientific reputation would seriously maintain that there is much in the tales of the natives.

Yet there was a day when the earth was populated with dragons. Their bone« have been dug up all over the world and may be aeen by anyone in any museum. But geologists say that the last of them perished at least four million years ago. In their day the earth was hot and moist; the land was covered with a vast tropical jungle and, so far as science has been able to discover, man had not yet made his appearance. For what is a dragon? There are m*ny different descriptions of them in the legends. But the general idea of a dragon is of an enormous creature with a head like a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus or a crocodile, claws like those of an eagle or a lion; sometimes wearing wings like a bat or an eagle; sometimes wingless. In a general way these legendary descriptions coincide with .those the geologists give us of the bearers of the huge skeletons that we stare at in the museums—the bones of the dinosaurus, j brontosaurus, diplodocus, plesorosaurus, pterodactyl, megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, and all the other giant lizards, whose names are as terrible as the originals must have been when alive. Carl Hagenbcck quotes native runners as telling him of a creature in the swamps of Rhodesia that was 'a huge monster, half elephant and half dragon,' which was a terror to all men by reason oi his great size and the swiftness with which he moved. A correspondent of the Bulawayo Chronicle had also heard of these monsters, and, being unable himself to search for them, he interviewed the | natives, submitting to them sketches of geological monsters and correcting these a* they suggested, until at last he evolved a drawing which the natives agreed resembled the terror of the swamps. This, they said, had the head and tail of a crocodile, the horns of a rhinocerous, the neck of a python and the body of a hippopotamous, and it propelled itself with flappers. Their estimates of its size varied, different natives setting it at from twenty-five to fifty feet in length. It is interesting to compare this dc- j scription with that of the supposedly extinct brontosaurus or diplodocus, the largest creature that ever roamed the earth, and whose bones now repose in the Now York Museum of Natural History. "It had," say« a scientific writer, "a long flexible neck like the ostrich, a thick, short, slab-sided body, and straight, massive, post-like limbs suggesting the elephant, and a remarkably small head for the size of the beast." The s'keleton of the brontosaurus in the Natural History Museum is 66ft Bin long and 15ft night at the hips. An average elephant is 18ft lon.s and lift high. The dinosaurus, to which family the brontosaurus and diploducs belonged, were harmless creatures in spite of their terrifying aspect. Their teeth show that they feed exclusively on the leaves and young shoots of trees. They themselves were the prey of such ferocious monsters as the deinodon, a carnivorous brute that propelled itself over the ground in a series of long leaps or bounds, something like the kangaroo's gait. The skull and claws of a deidon may be seen in the same museum.

He had fisrhting jaws, a large brain, and powerful claws. The museum has also a part of the spinal column of a diplodocus. dented and broken and still showing the marks of the teeth of the deinodon that killed it. If it should turn out that any of these primitive dragons are still alive in Central Africa, they .ire probably of the gentle herbivorous kinds, but the terror of the natives is none the less easilv understood. The scientific world lias been startled more, than once by unexpected verifications of what it had hitherto scorned as fable—for the scientific world is always scornful of what it has not seen. Herodotus used to be laughed at for hi* description of pigmies in the heart of Africa, but Sir Henrv M. Stanley found the pigmies and Sir Harry Johnston took some of them to England. The tales of huce white rhinoceri were ridiculed until a few years ago, when specimens were shot and brought out of Africa. And no one suspected the existence of such a creature as the Okapi until Sir Harry Johnston discovered him and secured specimens of his skin.