To the order of the Sauropods belong most of the monsters whose
discovery has attracted general attention in recent years. Feeding
on vegetal matter in the luscious swamps, and having their vast bulk
lightened by their aquatic life, they soon attained the most formidable
proportions. The admirer of the enormous skeleton of Diplodocus (which
ran to eighty feet) in the British Museum must wonder how even such
massive limbs could sustain the mountain of flesh that must have
covered those bones. It probably did not walk so firmly as the skeleton
suggests, but sprawled in the swamps or swam like a hippopotamus. But
the Diplodocus is neither the largest nor heaviest of its family. The
Brontosaur, though only sixty feet long, probably weighed twenty tons.
We have its footprints in the rocks to-day, each impression measuring
about a square yard. Generally, it is the huge thigh-bones of these
monsters that have survived, and give us an idea of their size. The
largest living elephant has a femur scarcely four feet long, but the
femur of the Atlantosaur measures more than seventy inches, and the
femur of the Brachiosaur more than eighty. Many of these Deinosaurs must
have measured more than a hundred feet from the tip of the snout to the
end of the tail, and stood about thirty feet high from the ground. The
European Sauropods did not, apparently, reach the size of their American
cousins--so early did the inferiority of Europe begin--but our Ceteosaur
seems to have been about fifty feet long and ten feet in height.
Its thigh-bone was sixty-four inches long and twenty-seven inches in
circumference at the shaft. And in this order of reptiles, it must be
remembered, the bones are solid.
To complete the picture of the Sauropods, we must add that the whole
class is characterised by the extraordinary smallness of the brain.
The twenty-ton Brontosaur had a brain no larger than that of a new-born
human infant. Quite commonly the brain of one of these enormous animals
is no larger than a man's fist. It is true that, as far as the muscular
and sexual labour was concerned, the brain was supplemented by a great
enlargement of the spinal cord in the sacral region (at the top of the
thighs). This inferior "brain" was from ten to twenty times as large as
the brain in the skull. It would, however, be fully occupied with the
movement of the monstrous limbs and tail, and the sex-life, and does
not add in the least to the "mental" power of the Sauropods. They were
stupid, sluggish, unwieldy creatures, swollen parasites upon a luxuriant
vegetation, and we shall easily understand their disappearance at the
end of the Mesozoic Era, when the age of brawn will yield to an age of
brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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