Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
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 favourably 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
bottleheads 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 examples as the great
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