Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/133

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We have now examined in detail the skeleton of an extinct quadruped of enormous magnitude; every bone of which presents peculiarities, that at first sight appear imperfectly contrived, but which become, intelligible when viewed in their relations to one another, and to the functions of the animal in which they occur.

The size of the Megatherium exceeds that of the existing Edentata, to which it is most nearly allied, in a greater degree than any other fossil animal exceeds its nearest living congeners. With the head and shoulders of a Sloth, it combined in its legs and feet, an admixture of the characters of the Ant-eater, the Armadillo, and the Chlamyphorus; it probably also still further resembled the Armadillo and Chlamyphorus, in being cased with a bony coat of armour. Its haunches were more than five feet wide, and its body twelve feet long and eight feet high; its feet were a yard in length, and terminated by most gigantic claws; its tail was probably clad in armour, and much larger than the tail of any other beast, among extinct or living terrestrial Mammalia. Thus heavily constructed and ponderously accoutered, it could neither run, nor leap, nor climb, nor burrow under the ground, and in all its Movements must have been necessarily slow; but what need of rapid locomotion to an animal, whose occupation of digging roots for food was almost stationary? and what need of speed for flight from foes, to a creature whose giant carcass was encased in an impenetrable cuirass, and who by a single pat of his paw,

the same dry and sandy plains, which were once inhabited by the Megatherium, and the Chlamyphorus lives almost entirely in burrows beneath the surface of the same sandy regions; they both probably receive from their cuirass the same protection to the upper parts of their bodies from sand and dust, which we suppose to have been afforded by its cuirass to the Megatherium. The Pangolins are covered with a different kind of armour, composed of horny movable scales, in which there is no bony matter.