256 BIG ANIMALS 



or vine-covered Apennines, will doubtless stand aghast at 

 the huge skeletons of our whales and our razorbacks, and 

 will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in the 

 exact words of my friend at South Kensington, ' Things 

 used all to be so very big in those days, usedn't they ? ' 



Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own 

 cetaceans and of ' geological ' animals is just this. The 

 Atlantosaurus of the Western American Jurassic beds, a 

 great erect lizard, is the very largest creature ever known 

 to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire length 

 is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no 

 complete skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature 

 he appears to have stood some thirty feet high, or over. In 

 any case, he was undoubtedly a very big animal indeed, for 

 his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or two feet taller 

 than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British Grena- 

 dier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height 

 and size ; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good 

 length of seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to 

 eighty, ninety, and even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly 

 entitled to say that we have at least one species of animal 

 now living which, occasionally at any rate, equals in size 

 the very biggest and most colossal form known inferentially 

 to geological science. Indeed when we consider the extra- 

 ordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern ceta- 

 ceans, as compared with the tall limbs and straggling 

 skeleton of the huge Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined 

 to believe that the tonnage of a decent modern rorqual 

 must positively exceed that of the gigantic Atlantosaurus, 

 the great lizard of the west, in propria persona. I doubt, 

 in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deino- 

 saur could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a 

 full-grown family razor-back whale. The mental picture 

 of these unwieldy monsters hopping casually about, like 



