66 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



whales, to whom a man would be but a 

 mouthful, just enough to whet his sharkship's 

 appetite. Even granting that the rule of three 

 unduly magnifies the dimensions of the brute, 

 and making an ample reduction, there would 

 still remain a fish between seventy-five and 

 one hundred feet long, quite large enough to 

 satisfy the most ambitious of tuna fishers, and 

 to have made bathing in the Miocene ocean 

 unpopular. Contemporary with the great- 

 toothed shark was another and closely related 

 species that originated with him in Eocene 

 times, and these two may possibly have had 

 something to do with the extinction of Zeug- 

 lodon. This species is distinguished by hav- 

 ing on either side of the base of the great tri- 

 angular cutting teeth a little projection or 

 cusp, like the "ear" on ajar, so that this spe- 

 cies has been named auriculatus, or eared. 

 The edges of the teeth are also more saw-like 

 than in those of its greater relative, and as the 

 species must have attained a length of fifty or 

 sixty feet it may, with its better armature, 

 have been quite as formidable. And, as per- 

 haps the readers of these pages may know, the 



