No. 521] SAUROPOD DINOSAURS 



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legged." For their "light-legged" qualities nature is 

 solely responsible, though I fail, standing before these 

 huge bones, to see why anybody should so describe them. 

 Students of the laeertilia and of the testudinata may 

 sneer, but it is beyond possibility to adopt the sugges- 

 tions which they from time to time make, that those of 

 us who are engaged in studing the dinosaurs shall squeeze 

 these creatures into the forms with which they are famil- 

 iar. The critics possibly do not realize that weeks and 

 months and years of study have been spent by those who 

 have been charged with the task of assembling these 

 remains and that the prescriptions, which they now 

 furnish, have been already tried without their sugges- 

 tion, and have for good reasons been found wanting. It 

 is easy for a knight of the quill, who has never practically 

 attended to the matter, to find fault. The latest attack 

 upon those who have been making a special study of the 

 sauropod dinosaurs has only served in the mind of the 

 speaker to prove the correctness of the careful work 

 which has been done in the past by students on both sides 

 of the Atlantic. Evolution has had something to do 

 since the sauropod dinosaurs walked the earth, and to 

 say simply because the laeertilia of the present day 

 creep and crawl that in Mesozoic times there were no 

 reptiles which walked, is to go further than the facts 

 seem to warrant. The pinnipedia and the cetacea live 

 in the waters: it does not necessarily follow that their 

 ancestors were aquatic in their habits and that their 

 limbs were like those which they possess. Because 

 snakes are to-day without feet or with only vestigial feet, 

 it does not follow that the ancestral forms in remote 

 antiquity moved as they move. Because a Varanus 

 crawls to-day it does not necessarily follow that a sauro- 

 pod dinosaur crawled. There is every evidence that 

 they did not crawl, but that the restorations of Marsh, 

 Osborn, and others are substantially correct in many 

 important particulars. It is "a far cry" from the 

 crocodilia, which, by the by, existed contemporaneously 



