Animals of the Past

Produced by Chris Curnow, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by Th...

Usually, too, the work of the elements is aided by that of animals and plants. Every one has seen a dog make way with a pretty good-sized bone, and the Hyena has still greater c...

From the better-preserved specimens that do now and then turn up, we are able to obtain a very exact idea of the construction of the bony cuirass by which Pterichthys and its Am...

The first of these sea-reptiles to be discovered has passed into history, and now reposes in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, after changing hands two or three times, the original...

Then, too, there are a few birds still left, such as the ostrich, that have not kept pace with the others, and are a trifle more like reptiles than the vast majority of their re...

The group to which Brontosaurus belongs, including Diplodocus and Morosaurus, is distinguished by a large, though rather short, body, very long neck and tail, and, for the size...

One bone might convey a great deal of information; on the other hand it might reveal very little; for, while it is very painful to say so, the popular impression that it is poss...

From the bones we learn that there were a great many kinds of Moas, twenty at least, ranging in size from those little larger than a turkey to that giant among giants, _Dinornis...

The horse was just as abundant in North America in Pleistocene time as in Europe; but there is no evidence to show that it was contemporary with early man in North America, and,...

As to why the mammoth became extinct, we _know_ absolutely nothing, although various theories, some much more ingenious than plausible, have been advanced to account for their e...

As for the size of the mastodon, this, like that of the mammoth, is popularly much over-estimated, and it is more than doubtful if any attained the height of a full-grown Africa...

From the great local abundance of their remains, it has been thought that the curious short-legged Pliocene rhinoceros, _Aphelops fossiger_, was killed off in the West by blizza...