MONSTERS PASSING AWAY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 36, 5 September 1891, Page 336

MONSTERS PASSING AWAY.

The age of monsters has pretty nearly passed away, only a few remaining, like the elephant arid the whale. Small animals with plenty of sense will always survive stupid giants in the long run, because they require less food and know better how to avoid danger. Observe, in illustration, how the doom of extinction has fallen upon the gigantic mammals which roamed over the earth by myriads only so short a time ago, comparatively speaking, as the beginning of the present era, called the ‘cenoxoic.’ There was the * dinoceras,’which lived in herds about the lakes, as the deposits show—big as an elephant, but in appearance somewhere between the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus, with three pairs of horns on its head and huge sabre-like tusks that fitted into sheaths in the lower jaw. More imposing yet was the ‘ tinoceias,’ somewhat similar of aspect and sixteen feet long. Not less impressive was the ‘ megatherium,’ or giant sloth, as large as two elephants, which attained a measurement of eighteen feet and procured the leaves on which it fed by seating itself upon its mighty haunches and uprooting great trees. Of the ‘ dinotherium ’ no complete skeleton has been discovered, but it was doubtless the biggest land mammal that ever lived. A full-grown skull of this earliest of proboscidians, which had long tusks as well as a trunk, measures five feet from the point of the lower teeth to the top of the head. The * brontops ’ of elephantine size, had a head like a rhinoceros, with huge horns. Quite as remarkable was the ‘ sivatberium,’ a beast like an antelope, but big as an elephant, with two conical horns on the front of its head and two immense spreading ones behind. Among birds were waders ten feet in height, such as the ‘ dinornis ’ and ‘ gastonnis.’ Contemporary with them were the mammoth and

mastadon, the woolly rhinoceros, armadillos nine feet in length, and the sabre-toothed tiger, larger than the greatest lion of to-day. All that is left of these wonders of animal life is found in deposits such as those of the western lakebeds. For years the Government has been engaged in excavating their bones, which are now to make part of what is destined to be the greatest zoological show on earth.