FEARSOME BEAST

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 6

FEARSOME BEAST

WIORLD’S GREATEST REPTILE.

In Central Africa, near Lake Tanganyika, lie the bones of the greatest reptile that ever wallowed in the marshes, perhaps the greatest animal that ever stalked the earth. The Germans Who found the remains of this fearsome beast which is rightly named Gigantosaurus, made some attempts to measure it, but the war descended on their peaceful labours before the whole skeleton could be dug out, and so we can only guess at its size by a comparison with the Diplodocus, which stretches its jointed backbone over SO feet of one of the galleries of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. The upper part of the flipper or foreleg of Diplodocus, which might be called its shoulderblade, measures about three and a half feet. But that of Gigantosaurus, which is built on somewhat the same lines as Diplodocus, is seven feet.

England, which has taken over the duties as well as the rights of Germany in Tanganyika Territory, has also in a modest way assumed .the scientific responsibility of digging out Gigantosaurus, but the British Museum has no such funds for pursuing the search as were given to the German geologists, so it may be a long time before the Great Departed of the. Age of Reptiles comes to town. '•An expedition under Mr W. E. Cutler is at Tendagru, 50 miles from the coast, and it has found many bones of enormous size, as well as bones of other Dinosaur reptiles.'and fossils of mammals and birds. But it will be a very difficult task to get these weighty remains to the coast unless some benefactor of science pays their fare by motor car. Recently a motor caravan brought many tons cf fossil reptiles to their last borne at the University of Utah. Transport of the same kind is wanted for the Tanganyika bones.

It is not merely the giant size of these ten-million-year-old bones which makes them interesting. The importance of them goes far deeper than that. When the geologists first began to seek these great dinosaurs the biggest cemeteries of them were found in North America. The simplest reason for that was that the American geologists had more money to spend on finding them. For a time these reptile regions in Wyoming were regarded as the chief home and birthplace of the Dinosaurs, but the American geologist and zoologist, Dr. Fairfield Osborn, and his fellow-workers, urged that search for the same reptiles should be made in Asia. The result of this suggestion was that a motor caravan expedition was sent into the Mongolian desert, where, besides many Dinosaurs, some astonishing Dinosaur eggs were found. In one of them was a tiny unhatched Dinosaur less than a coot long.

That famous discovery helped to show that the Dinosaurs wandered millions of years ago between North America and Asia, and grew up and developed in both countries for millions of years before the sea or some other cause cut them off from one another.

If Dinosaurs and similar reptiles, some of them the same and some of them larger, are found in Africa, the discovery raises many questions of exceeding interest. Did the Dinosaurs come from Asia by way of Palestine, of Sinai and Egypt, as the elephant did? Sir Harry Johnston, who has studied the -animals of Africa for nearly 50 years, believes that many of the greater mammals came that way, and then, with all Africa to roam in undisturbed, grew Larger and largjer. Perhaps the s>ame growth in size took place with the giant reptiles, which may have followed the same path. Some of them, like Gigant'osaurus, grew so large that the clayey swamps where they wandered sometimes gave way under their weight, and they perished by suffocation.

Till all the remains are collected and examined the migration theory is not proved. Africa is so great in size that its areas of life are widely separated from one another. The life of Madagascar is altogether different from that of Tanganyika, and both are different from those of West Africa and Egypt, or Morocco and Algeria. Abyssinia is different from the rest. So perhaps the Gigantosaurus did not emigrate ,to Africa, but began there. There is another sense in which. Africa is the land of the Great Departed. Sir Harry Johnston says that its great animals are being gradually destroyed. Since he went to Africa, 44 years ago, the lion and the leopard have fled from Tunis and Algeria. In another forty years at the present rate of extermination, all the African great mammals will have gone into museums.