Part 3 (2/2)

Talk about your cut-out puzzles! Here is a specis 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, as araves of these h a valley in the Rocky Mountains, he saw the bones of no less than seven sea-lizards staring at him fro 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, iven their lime and phosphate to the soil So you see this story of old bones, even froht matter

[Illustration: HOW THE WISE MEN ANSWER THE PUZZLES

By their e of the ists fit one bone frag parts in artificial material, and behold! the es There has been nothing equal to it since the vision of the prophet in the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37:1-10)]

II HOW THE MONSTERS DIED AND RETURNED TO DUST

”But you said these monsters lived in the sea and in swaet up into the mountains?”

WHEN THE INLAND SEA WENT DRY

Well, it's like this: As I said a while back, in the days of the reat sea reaching clear from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, and with swa far into lands that afterward becaan to rise, due to the shrinking of the earth--a thing that has been going on ever since the earth was born--the sea and the swamps went dry, and far to the west the land wrinkled up into the Rocky Mountains In these layers of rock that made the mountains were the bones of the monsters that had died when the rocks were stillthe borders of the inland sea

Not only did the land under the western portion of the sea slowly rise until the waters were completely closed in on the west, and the sea thus made that much narrower, but the rise of the land on the south cut off connection with the great salt ocean which surrounds the continents to-day So the salt-water fish, for lack of salt water, died, and with them the monsters like the Ichthyosaurus that lived on the salt-water fish that lived in this salt sea

But it wasn't alone that the seas grew narrower and more shallow because of the elevation of the lands Thein the west, cut off the rain-laden winds which blew from the Pacific in those days just as they do now Thus the seas dried up so much the faster But first, before the sea went entirely dry, its place was taken by the lakes and swamps into which it shrivelled up Loampy land is just what reptiles like, so this was their Golden Age, just as the previous ti fish and the fish-lizards

Then, as the land still rose and the clirew dryer, the reptiles passed away, and in came the mammal family, to which the cows and the horses and the cats and the kittens, and all the rest of us, belong

[Illustration: THE TIGER WITH THE SABRE TEETH

Tigers like this lived ages ago in both the Old World and the New They had canine teeth, curved like a sabre, in the upper jaw]

TOO MUCH BRAWN, TOO LITTLE BRAIN

Of course, even where they didn't die with their boots on, so to speak, as so many of them did in those lawless days, there came a time for each monster, in the order of nature, when he drew his last breath But what seeest and strongest of them--entirely disappeared and left no descendants![6] The whole of the mystery has not been unravelled yet, even by the wise ood deal For one thing, they know that most of the reptiles and the fish-lizards disappeared because so et a new boarding-place, and there wasn't any to get! Another thing was that these big fellows, although they _were_ so big, and got along finely while everything was just so, had so little brain they couldn't change their habits to meet new conditions, as our closer and cleverer cousins, the mammals, did Why, do you know that one of theseif he was an inch, and twelve feet high, had a brain no bigger than a man's fist? All the monsters of those days were like that--tons of bone and muscle, but a very small supply of brains

[6] That is to say, no descendants worthy of theenerate descendants of the big reptiles of old

So when things went against theive up, and, like a queer dream, they faded away But their historychapters in the whole wonderful story of the dust

Of all the live stock that have fed on the great world-farm and helped enrich it with their bones, these aniest that ever were seen!

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

”But since these o, and all that is usually found is a piece of them here and there, how do the men of science know so much about them--how they looked, and how they ate, and how they treated one another?”

That's a good question It _does_ seee Why, to hear them talk, you'd suppose these men, learned in ancient bones, had actually _ theood story and it will answer your question

Baron Cuvier, one of the ists, awoke froe, hairy creature with horns and hoofs And it said:

”Cuvier! Cuvier! I have co in the forhed