I will stake my reputation
upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great
saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous
marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great
snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and
sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any
other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own for
colossal forms of animal life.
Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big
animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about
everything having been so very much bigger 'in those days' have become
extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological
point of view, quite recent.
For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is
more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when
he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the
familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the
mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was
hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still
living--at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in
Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the
wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its
fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of
geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off
the last mammoth.
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