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ILLUSTRATION OF THE DIPLODOCUS 
The head was so small and so poorly provided with teeth that it must have been quite 
a task or a long-continued pleasure, according to the state of its digestive apparatus, for the 
animal to have eaten its daily meal. It is pretty safe to say that the Diplodocus weighed 20 
tons and would devour over 700 pounds of leaves or twigs or plants each day. One can 
readily see the advantage of the long neck in browsing off the vegetation on the bottom of 
shallow lakes while the animal was submerged, or in rearing the head aloft to scan the 
surrounding shores for the approach of an enemy; or, with the tail as a counterpoise, the 
entire body could be reared out of water and the head be raised some 30 feet in the air. 
From F. A. Lucas, Director American Museum of Natural History, in “Animals of the Past.” 
Photo from the late Charles R. Knight. 
once existing. Ages ago the crocodilians gions, giving way to the living repre- 
were generally distributed throughout sentatives which have survived within 
the world: the zone of decadence is now’ the tropics. While a few species stray 
marked by fossils in the temperate re- out of this area, their distribution fol- 
