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 

 Eeptiles, 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 role 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 



