174 EXTINCT MONSTERS 
who, with the assistance of Dr. Smith Woodward and the late 
Mr. Barlow, made the above restoration which may be seen at 
South Kensington. Baron Nopcsa has made a special study of 
Dinosaurs in Hungary. Dr. Mantell had already pointed out 
certain analogies between Iguanodon and the huge extinct sloths 
of the South American continent, that flourished in the much 
more recent Pleistocene period; and this idea is now considerably 
strengthened by the later discoveries of armoured Dinosaurs. 
These are his words: “In fine, we have in the Iguanodon the 
type of the terrestrial herbivora which, in the remote epoch of 
the earth’s physical history termed by geologists the age of 
Reptiles, occupied the same relative position in the scale of being, 
and fulfilled the same general purposes in the economy of nature, 
as the Mastodons, Mammoths, and the Mylodons (extinct sloths) 
of the Tertiary period, and the existing pachyderms.” 
It is, perhaps, one of the most interesting discoveries of modern 
geology, that certain races of animals now extinct have in various 
ways assumed some of the characteristics presented by animals 
much higher in the scale of being, that flourish in the present 
day. It seems as if there had been some strange law of anticipa- 
tion at work, if we may venture so to formulate the idea, It has 
already been shown how the great saurians Ichthyosaurus and 
Plesiosaurus presumed to put on some of the characters of whales, 
and to play their réle in nature, though they were only reptiles ; 
how the carnivorous Dinosaurs acquired teeth like those now 
possessed by lions and tigers, which also are mammals; and now 
we find herbivorous Dinosaurs imitating the Glyptodon, an 
armadillo that lived in South America almost down to the human 
period. We shall not lose sight of this very interesting and 
curious discovery, for other cases will present themselves to our 
view in future chapters. The reader might ask, “If reptiles 
