BRONTOSAURUS!

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 137, 8 December 1919, Page 7

BRONTOSAURUS!

A MAN WHO SAW IT.

(UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION.—COPIRIGHT.)

(REUTERS TELEGRAM.)

CAPETOWN, sth December.

News has been received from Elizabethvillo apparently corroborating tho existence of the prehistoric monster brontosaurus, for which the Smithsonion Institute expedition is searching. A Belgian hunter named Gapelle, who has returned from the interior of the Congo states that he followed a strange spoor for twelve miles, and sighted a beast certainly of the rhinoceros order. It .had large scales reaching far down, a very thick kangaroo-like tail, a horned snout, and a hump on its back. He fired shots at the monster, which threw up its head and disappeared in the swamp.

[This extraordinary story seems to have grown upon one of very different import. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the, existence of any prehistoric creatures is possible. Gapelle's animal was, he says, certainly of a rhinoceros order; the brontosaurr.s, as its name plainly indicates, was a lizard, whereas a rhinoceros is not a lizard. Last week, cable messages from Capetown announced a railway accident in the Belgian Congo, in which the members of an agricultural expedition of the Smithsonian Institute were involved. One of them, Professor Armstrong, was killed. Two. others, Shantz and Stowell, were named. The only one at present identifiable is Professor Shantz, who is a botanist and agricultural expert. Tlie messages t alleged that the party was in search of a brontosaurus which was said to exist in Central African wilds. This part of the story has probably been introduced because recently a remarkable set of fossil bones of the pre-historio beast was found at a place called Tendaguru, in German East Africa.]