THE RESTORATION OF EXTINCT ANIMALS. 



By Frederic A. Lucas, 



Acting Curator, Section <<f Vertebrate Fossils, U. S. National Mnseui 



Man}?- have been the attempts to recall the life of the pa.st and set 

 before us the living semblance of the animals that long- ago walked on 

 the face of the earth; and, while some of these reconstructions, such as 

 those that disport themselves through the columns of the Sunday 

 papers, have been literally creatures of the imagination, others, like 

 those prepared under the direction of Professor Osborn, have been the 

 result of long and careful studies of scientific men. The attitude of 

 the public toward such restorations is varied; a few there be who 

 accept them with implicit faith in their fidelity to nature, while others 

 have as little confidence in the most careful reconstructions as in those 

 made to order for the sensational newspaper or to fit the description 

 of some weird stor}^ in a popular magazine. BetAveen these extremes 

 there is a golden mean. While we can not be certain that the best-made 

 models or drawings correctly represent the animals as they were, we 

 may be sure that they rest on a solid foundation of fact and do give a 

 fairly good idea of the creatures for which they were intended. At 

 the worst, they are infinitely better and vastly more correct than many 

 of the older pictures of then little-known animals based on imperfect 

 specimens, poor sketches, or highly colored descriptions of those who 

 had actually seen the animals they were supposed to represent. They 

 are even better and more true to nature than many figures drawn from 

 stufl'ed specimens to be found in text-books, or even scientific works 

 of the earlier part of the nineteenth century and, for aught the writer 

 knows, Richardson's figure of the pocket gopher with his pockets 

 turned inside out may still be doing duty. 



It is but natural that we should desire to know how these strange 

 and mighty animals, upon which man never gazed, looked in life, and 

 this desire is ample justification for their restoration; and as material 

 has accumulated and our knowledge of extinct animals has increased, 

 it has become more and more possible to depict them with some degree 

 of accuracy. 



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