PREHISTORIC MONSTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 255, 27 October 1928, Page 16 (Supplement)

PREHISTORIC MONSTERS.

ARE ANY ALIVE TO-DAY?

STORIES FROM THE WILDS.

STRANGE ANIMALS REPORTED.

The first of a series of paintings, the gift of Ernest R. Graham, is being hung in the Field Museum in Chicago. These depict a mysterious and wondrous phase of the history of the earth. These scenes begin before the first specks bf sentient life—when the land and eea rose and fell to the pulsations, of long millenniums and nothing moved in the water or upon the hills—and the paintend with the shadowy origin of the age of man, writes Harry Goldberg in tha "San Francisco Chronicle."

With public interest stimulated by this group of canvases based upon the daring imagination of scientists and the recurring rumours that huge and strange; creatures have been seen in the more inaccessible corners of the world, speculation is once more rife upon the possibility that this descendants of the saurians, who lived some hundred? of millions of years ago, may yet be seen; or if a living relic of the giant lizards cannot be found, perhaps a later monster who belongs to the day of the sabrer tooth tiger and the mammoth will be trapped.

These representations of the remote antiquity of the earth and its .living creatures are the work of Charles' E. Knight, 'of New York, who is generally conceded to. be the world's leading artist in the reconstruction of early history of the planet. Seven of the paintings have been hung and they are units of the largest, most complete and most systematic reconstruction of those periods in. the evolution of , creation.

When Earth Was Cooling. The pictorial history begins with a scene during the cooling period when the planet was still a fiery ball. Next there is shown the beginnings in life, with the growth of fresh-water pools of blue-green algae, or mosslike plants. These are the first forms of life that science has any definite of, and their exigence har been deduced from the fossil finds. . '

Another shows the shore of the sea, about 500,000{000 yearsago, when the dominant form of creature was the great straight-shelled molluscs, some of them fifteen feet long. In the canvas are trilobites, distant relatives of the crab family, also the ancestors of insect life to-day.

A step ahead is a glimpse of the time of the stegosaur, a giant armoured lizard, grotesque and terrifying, an ancient of some 100,000,000 years ago. He looks fierce, but his brain was tiny, and scientists think his lack of offensive armour put at a great disadvantage with the more aggressive animals equipped with sharp teeth and murderous claws.

Then there is a view of the egg-laying dinosaurs —the protoceratops; the 'great moss (dinornis) of New Zealand, much lliro a giant predecessor of the ostrich, and also huge kangaroos as large as modern rhinos and the beginners of the family tree of the small kangaroo of oar own time.

Up ui|til the present time contemporary reports have never got beyond tho stage of rumour, according to views of scientists. Only recently the body of a strange beast wae said to have been discovered at the Port of. La Union in Salvador. Hunters found the monster soon after it died. Half its body was in the sea and half outside the water..

The body was like that of a bull with a head like a horse and fitted with four jaws, each one with seventeen teeth as thick as one's Word was sent out that it might be an ichthyosaurus of the Jurassic period, and it is being ' sent to the National Museum for study. AStory from the Andes. ' Descriptions of this beast do not fit anything known on earth to-day, according to- Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, I assistant curator of vertebrate paleon- > tology of the American Museum of 1 Natural History, who said it was quite 1 impossible that the corpse was that of? an ichthyosaurus. "They have 'been ex- ! tinct for millions of; years and no-trace 1 has been found .ofj them in rocks or j| recent geological discoveries" he : de!j dared. i;/ '. •'*' A; 7 . [| Not so long ago there was also a story j: of the existence of -plesiofcaurus which I' was seen in the territory of Ghubut, near !' the Andes Mountains in Argentine. Such I- a creature was-said to have been seen ii in the Santa) Cruz territory of Pategonia ! by the Governor, of the Territory and j-; by Senor Lista in,1890. It was described j as an enormous animal covered with reddish hair and protected by horny plates-against which rifles were useless; I Similar creatures were reported arbund Lake Blanea, Neuquen, Argentine, in 1892. From this lake settlers S heard weird noises and,; venturing out, they saw a-, huge animal which swam rapidly, elevating neck and tail alternately high above the water. . The plesiosaurus is an extinct marine reptil<y with four limbs developed •as paddles for swimming, Jul'addition to a , long neck and a crocodile-shaped body. In 1922 Prof. Onelli, director of the Buenos Aires ?00, organised , a party to hunt such an animal in Patagonia. "I , am laughed at/' he said, "but I am convinced that some large strange animal exists in Patagonia. When Theodore Roosevelt visited Argentina he was presented with a'fragment of hide picked up there. The hide was half an inch thick and curiously re-enforced beneath the surface with tiny rods of bone. It must have belonged to some animal re? centlyalive. What was itT - , , "Martin Sheffield, who wrote me that he saw the is my friend, and trustworthy. He is not scientific, biit I. have not .the , least doubt that he has seen a large and Btrange animal with a swan-like neck swimming in the lake.

/'Sheffield, an American/, has been hunting and prospecting there ftir some years. 'I have received a report that a Similar beast was seen in 1913 >hy an EngUsiiman in the lake in the/territory of Cruz farther south?'.

These reports tend to confirm two prje-J vious reports of the existence in Patagonia of animus unknown to moderns— 1 one. by the Norwegian scientist; Waag, in 1896, who saw the fresh footprints of a huge animal in the Santa Cruz terrain; the other from settlers around Neuquen. \ , No results were obtained from this source, and' the ' beast ; has s ela led the view 0$ inett:for some years. ■ . ' " . Before the Flood. ' In the same year, a tab came.,froin North-east Siberia that the antediluvian keratosaurur was alive in the Arctic Circles. It was said to be breaking roads over certain districts in Kamchatka (which apparently ledto fiehring Strait.

That the keratosaurus crossed the ice to Behrihg Strait was' credited* by French sportsmen, who believed that in •the "Partridge Creek monster of the Yukon, which they had prepared to hunt when the war broke out, they had the keratosaurus of Siberia." .

A'group are said to have seen it, including Tom Leemore, Georges Dupuy, James Butler and Father Lavagneux, when the Jurassic lizard kicked an avalanche of rocks down upon their heads. Writing later to Dupuy, after the Frenchman's return to Paris, the prieet reported that he and ten Indians had again seen it passing "like a hurricane across the frozen river, smashing immense blocks of broken ice in the air behind it. Its long bristles were covered with hoar-frost, and its immense red eyes flamed in the twilight.

"The monster held in its mouth a caribou that must have weighed 7001b, while it careened along at twenty miles an hour. At a corner of the cut-off- it disappeared."

Dupuy's own account includes the inspection of tho mud-print of a gigantic body. "The belly made a gully 40ft long," he reported, "3ft deep and 15ft wide. Four vast feet, a yard by half a yard at the least, had made a lot of prints."

The next day the party' •went out again.. "At noon we built a fire," Dupuy related. "We had almost given" up expecting anything when, as tea was hotting, down came an avalanche .of rocks, amid, such roarings, snortings, rumblings like thunder . . . the pre-historic thing, black, bulkier than four elephants, launched down the ravine beyond us, sweeping rocks aside like pebbles. Its withers stood 30ft high. Its entire body from rhinoceros horn to tip of massive tail must have measured 70ft or 80ft. Its hide was like that of the wild boar, covered with grey-black bristles 2ft long. Suddenly it raised its head and shook the hiUs with a roar. It romped down the ravine at forty miles an hour. Its head, held 50ft above the ground, was the last thing I saw."

Attempts were made to organise expeditions to . find this keratosaurus, but then the war came and ended everything.