The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 3

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 appet.i.tes, 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 gra.s.s, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 gra.s.s 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 circ.u.mference 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 mora.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ties 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sed 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.