MYSTERY MONSTER

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20465, 4 April 1938, Page 3

MYSTERY MONSTER

STRIDE OF 1B FEET After five months of searching in the west of the United States, Dr. Barnum Brown has returned to the Museum of Natural History with an 8-ton footprint clue to a “ mystery dinosaur,” a nightmare beast that could peep into a fourth-story window without stretching. Xot only did Dr. Brown literally pick up the trail of the unknown beast, but he brought back a carload of various dinosaur bones that illumine 20,000,000 hitherto dark years in the history of the fabulous reptiles. Among them are the skeletons of a few monsters new to science. Two /.footprints of the “ mystery dinosaur," thus unscientifically designated by the museum for the time being, will be placed on exhibition. Visitors will see a huge slab of shaly sandstone, showing in relief two semicircular imprints, originally left in coal-forming matter, each with three prongs where the toes pressed down. A w’hite string stretched from the centre of one print to the centre of the other, proves that the gigantic beast had a stride of fifteen feet two inches. Dr. Brown stressed that these were not two isolated markings, but the impressions made by a pair of feet in walking. This was the first stride track ever obtained, and therein lay its importance, Dr. Brown explained, adding that the creature that made it must have been about thirty-five feet high. Taped from heel to toe, and from side toe to side toe, the prints measure , thirty-four inches each way. The mystery dinosaur resembled a , kangaroo in that he had short upper ( legs and walked erect, but his loco- j motion was different. The beast stooped in a sinister, surreptitious way, waddling on long hind legs and dragging a ponderous, counterbalancing tail through prehistoric swamps.