Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/487

Rh the vertebræ, limb-bones, etc., of the brontosaurus, which have been found in these beds. If, according to these remains, we make a restoration of the whole skeleton, the result is an animal of about sixty feet in length. But this is not all. The bone of the upper hind-leg, the femur, of the brontosaurus is smaller than six feet.



But in the same museum there is, besides other remains, the femur of a very similar dinosaur, found in the same beds, which is about eight feet long, and belonged to an animal the length of which has been estimated at from eighty to a hundred feet. It has been called atlantosaurus, on account of its size. This atlantosaurus must have been a beast able to sweep down an elephant with a stroke of its tail as a crocodile would a dog. Of all the known land-animals, living or fossil ones, it is the largest, and it is probable that Nature reached a limit in producing land-animals of this size.

If we compare with the atlantosaurus the smallest known dinosaurs, we find an enormous difference. In the lithographic lime-stones of Solenhofen, in Bavaria, which have yielded so many well-preserved and interesting animals of the Jurassic formation, a dinosaur has also been found. This animal, called compsognathus, had posterior legs which were much longer than the anterior limbs. It therefore probably walked or hopped on its hind-legs like a kangaroo or a bird, and altogether, with its long neck and small head, must have resembled a good deal the birds of the same period.

The name of dinosaurs means terrible saurians (, terrible); and, indeed, the aspect of animals like the atlantosaurus and others was probably such as to justify this name. One of the oddest-looking creatures of this order must have been an animal called