Part 5 (2/2)
For where mere size furnishes sufficient protection one would hardly expect to find protective coloration as well, unless indeed a creature preyed upon others, when it might be advantageous to enable a predatory animal to steal upon its prey.
Color often exists (or is supposed to) as a s.e.xual characteristic, to render the male of a species attractive to, or readily recognizable by, the female, but in the case of large animals mere size is quite enough to render them conspicuous, and possibly this may be one of the factors in the dull coloration of large animals.
So while a green and yellow Triceratops would undoubtedly have been a conspicuous feature in the Cretaceous landscape, from what we know of existing animals it seems best to curb our fancy and, so far as large Dinosaurs are concerned, employ the colors of a Rembrandt rather than those of a sign painter.
Aids, or at least hints, to the coloration of extinct animals are to be found in the coloration of the young of various living species, for as the changes undergone by the embryo are in a measure an epitome of the changes undergone by a species during its evolution, so the brief color phases or markings of the young are considered to represent the ordinary coloring of distant ancestors. Young thrushes are spotted, young ostriches and grebes are irregularly striped, young lions are spotted, and in restoring the early horse, or Hyracothere, Professor Osborn had the animal represented as faintly striped, for the reason that zebras, the wild horses of to-day, are striped, and because the a.s.s, which is a primitive type of horse, is striped over the shoulders, these being hints that the earlier horse-like forms were also striped.
Thus just as the skeleton of a Dinosaur may be a composite structure, made up of the bones of a dozen individuals, and these in turn mosaics of many fragments, so may the semblance of the living animal be based on a fact, pieced out with a probability and completed by a bit of theory.
_REFERENCES_
_There is a large series of restorations of extinct animals, prepared by Mr. Charles R. Knight, under the direction of Professor Osborn, in the Hall of Palaeontology of the American Museum of Natural History, and these are later to be reproduced and issued in portfolio form._
_Should the reader visit Princeton, he may see in the museum there a number of B. Waterhouse Hawkins's creations--creations is the proper word--which are of interest as examples of the early work in this line._
_The ”Report of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution for 1900” contains an article on ”The Restoration of Extinct Animals,” pages 479-492, which includes a number of plates showing the progress that has been made in this direction._
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 27.--A Hint of Buried Treasures.]
VIII
FEATHERED GIANTS
_”There were giants in the earth in those days.”_
Nearly every group of animals has its giants, its species which tower above their fellows as Goliath of Gath stood head and shoulders above the Philistine hosts; and while some of these are giants only in comparison with their fellows, belonging to families whose members are short of stature, others are sufficiently great to be called giants under any circ.u.mstances. Some of these giants live to-day, some have but recently pa.s.sed away, and some ceased to be long ages before man trod this earth. The most gigantic of mammals--the whales--still survive, and the elephant of to-day suffers but little in comparison with the mammoth of yesterday; the monstrous Dinosaurs, greatest of all reptiles--greatest, in fact, of all animals that have walked the earth--flourished thousands upon thousands of years ago. As for birds, some of the giants among them are still living, some existed long geologic periods ago, and a few have so recently vanished from the scene that their memory still lingers amid the haze of tradition. The best known among these, as well as the most recent in point of time, are the Moas of New Zealand, first brought to notice by the Rev. W. Colenso, later on Bishop of New Zealand, one of the many missionaries to whom Science is under obligations. Early in 1838, Bishop Colenso, while on a missionary visit to the East Cape region, heard from the natives of Waiapu tales of a monstrous bird, called Moa, having the head of a man, that inhabited the mountain-side some eighty miles away. This mighty bird, the last of his race, was said to be attended by two equally huge lizards that kept guard while he slept, and on the approach of man wakened the Moa, who immediately rushed upon the intruders and trampled them to death. None of the Maoris had seen this bird, but they had seen and somewhat irreverently used for making parts of their fis.h.i.+ng tackle, bones of its extinct relatives, and these bones they declared to be as large as those of an ox.
About the same time another missionary, the Rev. Richard Taylor, found a bone ascribed to the Moa, and met with a very similar tradition among the natives of a near-by district, only, as the foot of the rainbow moves away as we move toward it, in his case the bird was said to dwell in quite a different locality from that given by the natives of East Cape. While, however, the Maoris were certain that the Moa still lived, and to doubt its existence was little short of a crime, no one had actually seen it, and as time went on and the bird still remained unseen by any explorer, hope became doubt and doubt certainty, until it even became a mooted question whether such a bird had existed within the past ten centuries, to say nothing of having lived within the memory of man.
But if we do not know the living birds, their remains are scattered broadcast over hillside and plain, concealed in caves, buried in the mud of swamps, and from these we gain a good idea of their size and structure, while chance has even made it possible to know something of their color and general appearance. This chance was the discovery of a few specimens, preserved in exceptionally dry caves on the South Island, which not only had some of the bones still united by ligaments, but patches of skin clinging to the bones, and bearing numerous feathers of a chestnut color tipped with white. These small, straggling, rusty feathers are not much to look at, but when we reflect that they have been preserved for centuries without any care whatever, while the buffalo bugs have devoured our best Smyrna rugs in spite of all possible precautions, our respect for them increases.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 28.--Relics of the Moa.]
From the bones we learn that there were a great many kinds of Moas, twenty at least, ranging in size from those little larger than a turkey to that giant among giants, _Dinornis maximus_, which stood at least ten feet high,[10] or two feet higher than the largest ostrich, and may well claim the distinction of being the tallest of all known birds. We also learn from the bones that not only were the Moas flightless, but that many of them were absolutely wingless, being devoid even of such vestiges of wings as we find in the Ca.s.sowary or Apteryx. But if Nature deprived these birds of wings, she made ample amends in the matter of legs, those of some species, the Elephant-footed Moa, _Pachyornis elephantopus_, for example, being so ma.s.sively built as to cause one to wonder what the owner used them for, although the generally accepted theory is that they were used for scratching up the roots of ferns on which the Moas are believed to have fed. And if a blow from an irate ostrich is sufficient to fell a man, what must have been the kicking power of an able-bodied Moa? Beside this bird the ostrich would appear as slim and graceful as a gazelle beside a prize ox.
[10] _The height of the Moas, and even of some species of aepyornis, is often stated to be twelve or fourteen feet, but such a height can only be obtained by placing the skeleton in a wholly unnatural att.i.tude._
The Moas were confined to New Zealand, some species inhabiting the North Island, some the South, very few being common to both, and from these peculiarities of distribution geologists deduce that at some early period in the history of the earth the two islands formed one, that later on the land subsided, leaving the islands separated by a strait, and that since this subsidence there has been sufficient time for the development of the species peculiar to each island. Although Moas were still numerous when man made his appearance in this part of the world, the large deposits of their bones indicate that they were on the wane, and that natural causes had already reduced the feathered population of these islands. A glacial period is believed to have wrought their destruction, and in one great mora.s.s, abounding in springs, their bones occur in such enormous numbers, layer upon layer, that it is thought the birds sought the place where the flowing springs might afford their feet at least some respite from the biting cold, and there perished miserably by thousands.
What Nature spared man finished, and legends of Moa hunts and Moa feasts still lingered among the Maoris when the white man came and began in turn the extermination of the Maori. The theory has been advanced, with much to support it, that the big birds were eaten off the face of the earth by an earlier race than the Maoris, and that after the extirpation of the Moas the craving for flesh naturally led to cannibalism. But by whomsoever the destruction was wrought, the result was the same, the habitat of these feathered giants knew them no longer, while mult.i.tudes of charred bones, interspersed with fragments of egg-sh.e.l.ls, bear testimony to former barbaric feasts.
It is a far cry from New Zealand to Madagascar, but thither must we go, for that island was, pity we cannot say is, inhabited by a race of giant birds from whose eggs it has been thought may have been hatched the Roc of Sindbad. Arabian tales, as we all know, locate the Roc either in Madagascar or in some adjacent island to the north and east, and it is far from unlikely that legends of the aepyornis, backed by the substantial proof of its enormous eggs, may have been the slight foundation of fact whereon the story-teller erected his structure of fiction. True, the Roc of fable was a gigantic bird of prey capable of bearing away an elephant in its talons, while the aepyornis has shed its wings and shrunk to dimensions little larger than an ostrich, but this is the inevitable result of closer acquaintance and the application of a two-foot rule.
Like the Moa the aepyornis seems to have lived in tradition long after it became extinct, for a French history of Madagascar, published as early as 1658 makes mention of a large bird, or kind of ostrich, said to inhabit the southern end of the island. Still, in spite of bones having been found that bear evident traces of the handiwork of man, it is possible that this and other reports were due to the obvious necessity of having some bird to account for the presence of the eggs.
The actual introduction of the aepyornis to science took place in 1834, when a French traveller sent Jules Verreaux, the ornithologist, a sketch of a huge egg, saying that he had seen two of that size, one sawed in twain to make bowls, the other, traversed by a stick, serving in the preparation of rice uses somewhat in contrast with the proverbial fragility of egg-sh.e.l.ls. A little later another traveller procured some fragments of egg-sh.e.l.ls, but it was not until 1851 that any entire eggs were obtained, when two were secured, and with a few bones sent to France, where Geoffroy St. Hilaire bestowed upon them the name of _aepyornis maximus_ (the greatest lofty bird). Maximus the eggs remain, for they still hold the record for size; but so far as the bird that is supposed to have laid them is concerned, the name was a little premature, for other and larger species subsequently came to hand.
Between the aepyornithes and the Moas Science has had a hard time, for the supply of big words was not large enough to go around, and some had to do duty twice. In the way of generic names we have Dinornis, terrible bird; aepyornis, high bird; Pachyornis, stout bird; and Brontornis, thunder bird, while for specific names there are robustus, maximus, t.i.tan; gravis, heavy; immanis, enormous; cra.s.sus, stout; ingens, great; and elephantopus, elephant-footed--truly a goodly array of large-sounding words. But to return to the big eggs! Usually we look upon those of the ostrich as pretty large, but an ostrich egg measures 4-1/2 by 6 inches, while that of the aepyornis is 9 by 13 inches; or, to put it another way, it would hold the contents of six ostrichs' eggs, or one hundred and forty-eight hens' eggs, or thirty thousand humming birds' eggs; and while this is very much smaller than a waterb.u.t.t, it is still as large as a bucket, and one or two such eggs might suffice to make an omelet for Gargantua himself.
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