Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
and those of Atlantosaurus as one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as
reptiles, we have certainly nothing at all to come up to these; but our
cetaceans, as a group, show an assemblage of species which could very
favorably compete with the whole lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle
show. Indeed, if it came to tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right
whale could easily give points to any deinosaur that ever moved upon
oolitic continents.
The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium
and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in
livestock; but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no
means came near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same
period could have held their own well against our existing giraffes,
elks, and buffaloes; but taking the group as a group, I don’t think
there is any reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the
living fauna of this present age.
For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still
possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus,
the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison,
the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are
generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and
most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and
ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment
of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter
of fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now
sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as
the camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our
New Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale
is more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual,
one hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic
American Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our
bottle-heads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four,
our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy.
True fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but
some of the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest
cetaceans. The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid
rapacity, would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe,
for the best bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I
would back our modern Carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against
any plesiosaurus that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for Rhinodon, a
gigantic shark of the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to
a length of fifty feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will
stake my reputation upon it that he would have cleared the secondary
seas of their great saurians in less than a century. When we come to
add to these enormous marine and terrestrial creatures such other
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