The Washburn times. [volume] (Washburn, Wis.) 1896-1976, 1920-04-29

Al
man could meet. And Deinodon was
swift and active, built for speed as
well as power. One could neither
dodge him nor outrun him, and the av-
erage man would be just about the
size of prey that he would consider
suitable for meal.
The skeleton stands IL feet, 5 inches
high-zabout twice the height of man.
The length from nose to tip of tail is
20 feet, and for all his slim and ele-
CANT proportions he probably weighed
in life several times as much as any
lion or tiger.
DR.. w. d. Matthew, curator of the
museums department of vertebrate
paleontology, says that, fortunately for
us, perhaps, the Deinodon was not one
Of the beasts our prehistoric ances-
tors had to contend with. They had
cave-lions and hyenas and wolves and
great cave-bears, not to mention man.
moths and mastodons and woolly
rhinoceroses those were quite enough.
If they had had lot of carnivorOus
dinosaurs into the bargain, they might
have been wiped out altogether. But
the dinosaurs had all become extinct
long before the time of the prehistoric
cave men. The Deinodcn lived during
the Cretaceous period of the age of
reptiles-some sixty odd millions of
years ago, If we may rely on the cal
culations based on the alteration Of
radioactive minerals.
At that time, our very, very remote
ancestors were little opossum-like fur
ry creatures. living in trees and quite
too small and inconspicuous to be
troubled by the huge reptiles who in
those days held the earth in Fee But
in revenge Of this disdain, it has been
suggested, our little opossum ances-
tors may have helped to bring about
the extinction of the great dinosauri-
an aristocracy-by sucking their eggs.
This skeleton was found three years
ago by Charles H. Sternberg, in the.
great canyon of the Red Deer river
in Alberta. The canyon, 500 feet deep
and margined by steep walls and bad
land gullies, is the richest repository
for dinosaur skeletons that has yet
been discovered. 1t cuts through the
heart of the finest wheat district of the
Canadian West, and the rolling prai-
RE with its waving fields of grain,
above, contrasts picturesquely with the
swiftly flowing river far below at the
bottom Of its deep trench, cutting
through the midst of this great -ceme-
terry of creatures of the long ago.
But in Deinodon's time, the coun-
try was very different, both in geog-
raphy and climate. A broad interior
sea, which had once stretched from the
Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic ocean,
was gradually Swallowing and filling
up with marshes, low-lying swampy
forests and savannahs in which the
Deinodon and other giant reptiles
lived. The climate, if one may judge
from the palms, bananas, plantains and
other tropical trees that f1ourished
there, was much warmer, but the an
nual growth-rings on fossil tree trunks
(of which a fine specimen is on view
in the same hall with the dinosaur
skeletons) show, that there was at
least a dry and rainy season; and
there were many trees willows and
tulip trees, sycalnores and oaks, that
were very much like those of the pres
ent day.
The animal world was far more
strange. Not only was there no sign
of man or. even anything distantly sug-
costing his future evolution, but not