42 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



earnest of these was that of M. Oudemans, who ex- 

 pressed his belief in the existence of some rare and huge 

 seal-like creature whose occasional appearance in 

 southern waters gave rise to the best authenticated 

 reports of the sea-serpent. Among other possibilities 

 it has been suggested that some animal believed to be 

 extinct had really lived over to the present day. Now 

 there are a few waifs, spared from the wrecks of ancient 

 faunas, stranded on the shores of the present, such as 

 the Australian Ceratodus and the Gar Pikes of North 

 America, and these and all other creatures that could 

 be mustered in were used as proofs to sustain this 

 theory. If, it was said, these animals have been spared, 

 why not others? If a fish of such ancient lineage as the 

 Gar Pike is so common as to be a nuisance, why may 

 there not be a few Plesiosaurs or a Mosasaur somewhere 

 in the depths of the ocean? The argument was a good 

 one, the more that we may " suppose" almost anything, 

 but it must be said that no trace of any of these 

 creatures has so far been found outside of the strata in 

 which they have long been known to occur, and all the 

 probabilities are opposed to this theory. Still, if some 

 of these creatures had been spared, they might well 

 have passed for sea-serpents, even though Zeuglodon, 

 the one most like a serpent in form, was the one most 

 remotely related to snakes. 



Zeuglodon, the yoke-tooth, so named from the shape 

 of its great cutting teeth, was indeed a strange animal, 

 and if we wonder at the Greenland Whale, whose head 

 is one-third its total length, we may equally wonder at 

 Zeuglodon, with four feet of head, ten feet of body, and 

 forty feet of tail. No one, seeing the bones of the trunk 

 and tail for the first time, would suspect that they be- 

 longed to the same animal, for while the vertebra? of the 

 body are of moderate size, those of the tail are, for the 



