The Reign of Reptiles 



largest bones known, and beside the thigh-bone, 

 or femur, of one of these giants, that of an ele- 

 phant appears small and slender. Still, news- 

 paper "stories" have so magnified them that 

 possibly the reader may feel a twinge of disap- 

 pointment to learn their actual size. At pres- 

 ent the record is held by the thigh-bone of a 

 Camarasaurus in the Field Columbian Museum, 

 which measures 6 feet 8 inches in length, and 

 weighs, in its fossilized condition, 875 pounds. 

 If this seems small, let it be remembered that 

 this is 6 inches taller than a very tall man, nearly 

 1 foot taller than the average man, and that 

 even before it was turned to stone it weighed 

 as much as two large men together. Jumbo was 

 a large elephant, much the largest ever seen in 

 this country, yet Jumbo's thigh-bone is but 4 

 feet 1 inch long, and slender at that, when 

 compared with the femur of the dinosaurs. 



The individual vertebrae of the neck and 

 body sections of the great dinosaurs are very 

 wonderful structures, not merely from their 

 size, although they are the largest known, but 

 for the manner in which they are built. The 



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