GREATEST BEAST OF PREY.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIIC, Issue 14152, 11 March 1910, Page 6

GREATEST BEAST OF PREY.

_ Tb» Iftlgest of the huge fiesheating lizard*, or dinosaurs, of the-cretaceous period, whose skelotop. now graces one of the halls of the Natural History Museum in. New York, was according to the American Museum Journal, "the largest beast of prey that ever livqd." This particular genus has been christened the "Tyrannosaur." "Forty feet iji length, with huge and massive- skull, the jaws four feet long armed with sharply pointed teßth, each projecting from two to six inches from the socket, this monster is beyond comparison the greatest carnivorous animal that ever inhabited the land'. * "The museum has secured three skeletons of this rare dinosaur. The rock in which these skfleftons were found is a loosely cemented sandstone but the skeletons are partly or wholly ©noosed in great concretionary masses of flinty hardness. Extracting the bones uninjured is a slow and difficult task and it not yet complete on the third and finest of tlio skeletons. "Thero is no living beast of prey that compares with the great carnivorous dinosaurs. The lion and the tiger r prey upon the medium-sized and smal-ler-hoofed animals; they do not usuejly molest the great 'pachyderms (the elephant and tho rhinoceros). But during

the Age of Reptiles the Allosaurus of the Jurassic, the Tyranuosaurus of the Cretaceous, were fitted by nature to attack and prey upon the largest of their herbivorous contemporaries; and the size and power of their weapons for attack far surpass anything seen among modern carnivores or those of the ago of mammals. Conversely the largest herbivorous dinosaurs wore armour or weapons for defence much heavier and more powerful than can be found among the great jnehyderms of modern times, whose thick skin is mainly a protection against accidental injury of the -attacks of insects.