The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1907-03-23

istence save in the occasional discoveries, deep il
the earth, of few BONES we'll preserved Is not sur.
prising. The world on the surface OF which We
live is always changing. Nothing IS today what il
was even hundred years ago. A thousand wears
brings enormous changes. but life is too fIaeting
for any one person to notice the change. Many
species of animals which existed Il thousand wears
ago are gone forever.
Animals That Have Disappeared.
Paeontology, the science of extinct organic
life. shows series of animals which were ON the
earth long time ago, some of which were coutcm-
noraneouS with man, or disappeared short time
before his advent upon the earth OF these were
the cave-bear the cave-hyena the mammoth the
woolly rhinoceros, the hippopotamus major. the
Alas elephant and the Irish elk Their presence
is betrayed by genuine fossils or the remains Of
their Skeletons which. whether petrfied not.
have been dug up chiseled out of rocks III remote
and out of the way places The science of compar
ative anatomy animal morphOgraphy has cIas@i-
fled them and compared them with the animal life
now existing and proved them to be of strange and
monstrous proportions While looking the
marvellous exhibits of these prehistoric creatures
now i'll our great museums ION est prls de vertigo,
is seized with dizziness, to use the expression
of VI. Renan
A wear ago last October the largest flesheating
animal thus far known to the world was nearthed
in Northern Montana by an expedition sent out by
the American Museum of Natural History, New
\ Ork This constitutes one of the most remarkable
finds in the recent history of paleontology Enough
parts of this huge animal were found to make it
possible to estimate accurately what his size was
when he roamed the earth. From the tip of his
tail to the front of his nose he measured when
alive thirty-nne feet The distance from his head,
normally posed, to the ground would be nineteen
feet Of such Importance to science was this dis
covery that Redistribution of the carnivorOus
dinosaurs of the cretaceous geological period will
have to be made. Tvrannosauros now becomes the
name of new genus. These flesh-eating tyrants
of the latter pare of the age of reptiles now show
themselves to be far diversified than had been
supposed a few years ago. These monsters fed on
the great grass and bark-eatng animals of their
time.
Foe of the Triceratops
This beast was large enough and strong enough
to attack the great threehorned Iriceratops, of
the most interesting of the Dinosaur family fine
skeleton of which has recently been set up III the
National Museum, Washington. This animal had
skull which projected upward over the neck and
carried as weapons of defence and attack three for
midabe horns He weighed twenty thousand
pounds and was as big again as an ordinary ele-
phsnt. Professor Osborn and the scientists of the
American Museum of Natural History state that
in an open fight this grass and grain-eatng evia-
than was always beaten killed and devoured by the
flesheating tyrant king of Saurians. The story of
how this discovery was made is one of the romances
of geological history. A few years ago Mr.. Horna-
day assistant superintendent of the New York
Geological Park, went on a hunting trip into the
wilds of Montana. On his return he gave the cura-
tor of the Geological Park fossized bone which
he had found in remote corner of Montana The
animal to which the bone belonged was the Tri-
ceratOps. This, said the curator, on examining
1t closely, rs of the horns of the Iriceratops
and is exceedingly valuable to geological science
The following summer Mr.. Barnum Brown, an ex-
pert on fossils, accompanied by Mr. Hornaday and
a party of specialists, went to Montana to the To-
caty where the horn was found. They unearthed
or rather out of the face of the rock cliff the
bones of the ,Triceratops But. most wonderful of
all on continuing their researches. they found the
almost complete skeleton of the monster flesh-eat-
ing Dinosaur or tyrant king of the Saurians The
bones of this pre-Adamite monster, precious
than gold, shipped home in strongly bound and
carefully made boxes. some of them, when screwed
down, weighing over two tons. When they arrived
at the museum they mpacked with great care
and cleaned with as much attention as if they were
precious stones to be cut and polished into price
less Jewels A large force of skilled workInen I'M
der the direction of the curator placed and wired
every bone in its proper place; missing pieces were
modelled from plaster of Paris. and today the COM
peted skeleton of this frghtful denizen of the very
remote past is before US to bear additional testi-
mony to that of the apostle that with God all
things are possible" Another time | will return
to the history of discoveries and our methods
of cleaning; classifying and mounting the bones of
the megatheria and the remains of the wonderful
lizards, fishes and reptiles found deep down in the
cays and rocks of what are known as the plocene
and post-pliocene ncriods