The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-04-10
ANOTHER BIG ONE.

region of the West which embraces portions, if not all, of Montana, Neva- da, Wyoming. Nebraska, Kansas and others of that great region at times yields to the modern scientist and ex- plorer evidences of the strange and gigantic creatures which once lorded it over what must have been vast marshy country. There some millions of years ago, more or less, strange creatures. walked. flew, swan or waded. with no human being to hunt them. and nothing to modest them but creatures of their own kind Tn fact. it was per haps well that primitive man did not exist contemporaneousiy with these creatures. for his chances would have been slim. Even now, with all the ath-dealing appliances of our day, man who found himself in such an en- vironment would stand an exceedingly poor, show for rife. liberty and the pursuit of happiness" As an evidence of 1t, we copy from chart issued by the American Museum Of Natural His tory in New York. the following brief account of one of the most recent | finds:
 The Brontosaurus representative of a | vanished race. the largest creature that ever walked on four feet. sixty-six 7. ix feet and inches, his water displace- ment S5 tons, and his estimated weight s4 tons. Compared with the corre- horse, the Brontosaurus is proved to | be built with uncommon. trim com | pactness It is the heavy arch of the ! of such grotesque looseness of contour. The head is revolting in its smallness | compared to the huge body. Scarcely the smallest part of the skull cavity is ! given to the brain. In fact, the spinal cord of the Brontosaurus was consid- erabiy larger than the brain allotted sacrum the most of the reflex motions of the immense reptile were controlled by this secondary. brain. There is something so feeble. so intellectual in this insignificant head and in the spoon shaped teeth so inadequate to any sterper task than pulling up juicy wa formidable element in its appearance | contrasts so strangely with it's enor- nous size that the effect is almost sim l ister.
 The "monstrum horrendum.' as old Virgil might have named him. would have taken the starch out of the bold est hunter that now lives and pops over the relatively small game yet to | be found in that region. We have no means of knowing If he was as dan gerous as the description of him would indicate, but we imagine that his looks would have been sufficient to take the edge off the hunting appetite of any ordinary human. And even his looks was not the worst of him, for they have discovered or assumed that the lovely brute had voice fully in pro- portion to his other accomplishments The screech of a fog-horn. the yell of a syren, the believing of a steamboat and the whistle of locomotive would all have to take back-seats when an animal weighing ninety-four tons got busy with his voice. We are some- what glad they are all dead They have given him the everyday name of Thunder-saurus, and we suspect that he fitted 1t.
 This old relic was found in Nevada | in what is designated the Trassic limestone deposit, but the geologias are not telling us how long it lay there. When one of them asserts that 1t was perambulating around the wilds of Nevada, nibbling the weeds and soaring things to death eight million years ago, he only does 1t to throw us off the scent and keep Us from asking questions. He knows that if he can't prove 1t. neither can we disprove it, so we are even. If he should say the creature cashed in not less than bIl- lion years ago, we could but take his word for 1t and think of something else. To tell the truth, we don't care how old he is.
 It is really interesting to read of the form and construction of such creatures, for this is one of a type. We have a feeling of curiosity when we read of his size, shape and disposition. He must have borne some resemblance to an enormously large goose with head
 of usual size. If he had been a fowl
 the disproportion would not have stood out so prominently. but 1t was evil
 dently an animal which walked the
 earth or waddled through the mud and
 marshes of that infinitely remote pe-
 riod of our planets existence. Hitch
 ing eighty or ninety tons of body onto
 hundred pounds or so of head would
 have loked some like coupling the head
 of a black snake to the body of a rhin.
 oceros.
 We wonder what such creatures a:
 this Brontosaurus were made for, ol
 what part they occupied in the scheme , of creation. There. was nobody to ad
 mire him, hunt him or put him in g
 museum. He was probably in the way
 of everything else, and We suspect wa: something of nuisance. And, by tn, way, 1t is a good thing that all hil !. kind went out before Noah's day, ol they would have made things uncom fortable in his boat. Doubtless the, . were created for a purpose, and doubt less they fulfilled it, but we are in thu , dark as to what that purpose was Per | haps this animal was but the one linl
 in an almost endless chain of created
 things, each link being a step forwart and upward. After him the upwart 5 growth and development went forwart 5 in regular sequence till the fullness O