108 GIANT FOSSIL SHARK 



others, shown in the three cases in front of the visitor, attained large size and 

 were evidently formidable creatures. One of them in fact, Dinichthys, 

 shown in the middle of the gallery, was probably among the most destruc- 

 tive creatures that ever lived in the sea. It> jaws were so strong that it 

 could crush a plate of bone as thick as one'- hand. Such an actual speci- 

 men, fractured in life and showing the marks of "teeth" is shown in a 

 neighboring case. 



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RESTORATION OF NAOSAURUS 



One of Nature's jokes. Professor Cope, who was also a joker, suggested that the high fin served 

 as a sail, by means of which Naosaurus sailed over the lakes near which it lived 



The collection is so arranged that he who makes the tour can see the 

 principal kinds of fossil fishes and is able, in a measure, to outline the 

 history and pedigree of the entire group. He can trace the rise and fall 

 of the early plate-covered fishes; the era of the sharks which on the one 

 hand supplanted the earliest fishes and were in time replaced by the more 

 efficient lungfishes and ganoids; the age of ganoids when the waters were 

 filled with these enamel-scaled fishes; finally the age of the bony-fishes, 

 or teleosts, the multitudinous forms of to-day, the herrings, cods, perches, 

 whose methods of swimming, feeding and breeding are far more efficient 

 than those of any of their predecessors. 



Above the entrance are the jaws (models), spreading nine feet, of a 

 huge fossil shark in which the actual teeth are arranged as 

 jaws o j n t j ie snar j cs f to-dav, in the usual banks or rows — the 



Giant Fossil , . . . . . . . . . 



Shark teeth in the hinder rows serving to replace those in front, 



nature having dealt more kindly in the matter of teeth 

 with sharks than with man. Such a shark probably measured from seventy 

 to ninety feet and its race may well have become extinct, when for various 



