The Adventures of a Grain of DustHawksworth, Hallam
History
The Adventures of a Grain of Dust
Hawksworth, Hallam
Natural history -- Juvenile literature; Physical geography
Another early ploughman was a bird, the Moa. The Moa had no wings, but
his muscular legs were simply enormous, and so were his feet. New
Zealand seems to have been the headquarters of the Moas. There used to
be loads of them as shown by the huge deposits of their bones. They are
supposed to have been killed in countless numbers during the Ice Ages in
the Southern Hemisphere; for there were Ice Ages in the Southern as
well as the Northern Hemisphere. In one great morass in New Zealand
abounding in warm springs, bones of the Moas were found in such
countless numbers, layer upon layer, that it is thought the big birds
gathered at these springs to keep warm during those great freezes.
THE MILLSTONES OF THE MOAS
Besides the work they did with feet and bills you may imagine how much
nice fresh stone the Moas must have ground up in their crops during the
millions of years they existed. It was a regular mill--the gizzard of a
Moa--full of pebbles as big as hickory nuts. Scattered about the springs
where their bones are found are little heaps of these pebbles, each the
contents of a gizzard. Like miniature tumuli, they mark the spots where
the bodies of the Moas returned to dust.
Perhaps some of those flesh-eating Dinosaurs did a little ploughing once
in a while, too; for one theory is that those ridiculous little arms
were used for scratching out a nest for the eggs, just as the crocodiles
and the alligators and the turtles dig nests for their eggs to-day. For
all these animals, as did the Dinosaurs, belong to the reptile family,
and show the family trait of digging out nests for their eggs.
[Illustration: A PUZZLE PAGE FROM THE GREAT STONE BOOK
Talk about your cut-out puzzles! Here is a specimen of the kind of
puzzle Nature and the course of things in the darkest ages of world
history have cut out for the paleontologists. It is a find of ancient
bones in the asphalt deposits near Los Angeles.]
Although the Dinosaurs roamed the swamps and lowlands of all the ancient
world, their favorite resort was the territory now occupied by our
Western States--judging from the quantities of bones they left--while
that old Mediterranean Sea of ours was full of their kin, the
sea-lizards. Professor Marsh, of Yale, who was among the first
explorers of the graves of these monarchs of the past, says that one
day, while riding through a valley in the Rocky Mountains, he saw the
bones of no less than seven sea-lizards staring at him from the cliffs.
Yet, only here and there by the wearing through of the rocks by flowing
streams has nature opened up these vast mausoleums, the mountains and
the cliffs. What enormous quantities of bones, then, must still be
buried there, what tons and tons must have given their lime and
phosphate to the soil. So you see this story of old bones, even from a
farming standpoint, is no light matter.
[Illustration: HOW THE WISE MEN ANSWER THE PUZZLES
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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