Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum CollectionsMatthew, William Diller
Science
Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
Matthew, William Diller
Dinosaurs
These Beaked Dinosaurs were, so far as we can tell, all vegetarians.
Unlike the birds, they retained their teeth and in some cases
converted them into a grinding apparatus which served the same purpose
as the grinders of herbivorous quadrupeds. It is interesting to
observe the different way in which this result is attained. In the
mammals the teeth, originally more complex in construction and fewer
in number, are converted into efficient grinders by infolding and
elongation of the crown of each tooth so as to produce on the wearing
surface a complex pattern of enamel ridges with softer dentine or
cement intervening, making a series of crests and hollows continually
renewed during the wear of the tooth. In the reptile the teeth,
originally simple in construction but more numerous and continually
renewed as they wear down and fall out,[15] are banked up in several
close packed rows, the enamel borders and softer dentine giving a
wearing surface of alternating crests and hollows continually renewed,
and reinforced from time to time, by the addition of new rows of teeth
to one side, as the first formed rows wear down to the roots. This is
the best illustrated in the _Trachodon_ (see fig. 27); the other
groups have not so perfect a mechanism.
A. THE IGUANODONTS: IGUANODON, CAMPTOSAURUS.
_Sub-Order Ornithopoda or Iguanodontia._
In the early days of geology, about the middle of the nineteenth
century, bones and footprints of huge extinct reptiles were found in
the rocks of the Weald in south-eastern England. They were described
by Mantell and Owen and shown to pertain to an extinct group of
reptiles which Owen called the Dinosauria. So different were these
bones from those of any modern reptiles that even the anatomical
learning of the great English palaeontologist did not enable him to
place them all correctly or reconstruct the true proportions of the
animal to which they belonged. With them were found associated the
bones of the great carnivorous dinosaur _Megalosaurus_; and the weird
reconstructions of these animals, based by Waterhouse Hawkins upon the
imperfect knowledge and erroneous ideas then prevailing, must be
familiar to many of the older readers of this handbook. Life size
restorations of these and other extinct animals were erected in the
grounds of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, London, and in Central
Park, New York. Those in London still exist, so far as the writer is
aware, but the stern mandate of a former mayor of New York ordered the
destruction of the Central Park models, not indeed as incorrect
scientifically, but as inconsistent with the doctrines of revealed
religion, and they were accordingly broken up and thrown into the
waters of the Park lake. Small replicas of these early attempts at
restoring dinosaurs may still be seen in some of the older museums in
this country and abroad.
[Illustration: Fig. 26.--SKELETON OF CAMPTOSAURUS, AN AMERICAN
RELATIVE OF THE IGUANODON.]
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