136 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



are considered to represent the ordinary color- 

 ing of distant ancestors. Young thrushes are 

 spotted, young ostriches and grebes are irreg- 

 ularly striped, young hons are spotted, and in 

 restoring the early horse, or Hyracothere, Pro- 

 fessor Osborn had the animal represented as 

 faintly striped, for the reason that zebras, the 

 wild horses of to-day, are striped, and because 

 the ass, 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 sem- 

 blance 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 ani- 

 mals, prepared by Mr. Charles R. Knight, tinder the 

 direction of Professor Osborn, in the Hall of Palaeon- 

 tology of the American Museum of Natural History, 



