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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XL! V 



with the sauropoda, and the genera Brontosaurus, Moro- 

 saurus, and Diplodocus. 



The Tornierian hypothesis may be dismissed, I think, 

 as not within the range of the possible. It has, as one 

 of my learned paleontological friends in Europe jocosely 

 remarked to me, 1 1 only this feature to recommend it, that 

 it accounts for the speedy disappearance of the sauro- 

 poda, because if true, their lives must have been spent 

 in indescribable agony, every joint being dislocated." 



Both Dr. Hay and Professor Tornier indulge in specu- 

 lation as to the food of Diplodocus. Tornier emphat- 

 ically repudiates the idea that the animal was herbivorous 

 and suggests that it was piscivorous. Sternfeld pictures 

 it as squatting on the banks of streams and feeding on 

 snails, bivalves, and amphibians. Hay approves of the 

 suggestion of the present speaker, that Diplodocus may 

 have fed upon algae. In this field we are all more or 

 less left to our imaginations, and one man's guess is as 

 good as another's. In view of the fact that cycads were 

 numerous at the time when the Diplodocus and its allies 

 lived and died, it may not be improper to renew the sug- 

 gestion that possibly these plants furnished the food of 

 the sauropod dinosaurs. However the terminal buds 

 would have been poor fodder, being woolly and harsh, 

 and the leaves are as stiff as wires and could not have 

 been masticated by such teeth as the Diplodocus pos- 

 sessed. On the other hand the interior of the stems of 

 the cycads, "sago-palms," is in all recent species a 

 veritable mine of nutritious food, and was presumably 

 the same in the ancestral forms. While the compara- 

 tively feeble dentition of the Sauropoda would not have 

 been of much use in getting at these supplies of starchy 

 food, the heavy claw-like armature of the feet was quite 

 equal to the task of ripping open the thin outer bark of 

 the stems, and this accomplished, a single cycad stem 

 of some of the larger species would have furnished a 

 good meal of soft food capable of satisfying the hunger 

 even of a Diplodocus. This suggestion has been freely 

 discussed by the speaker with Dr. N. L. Britton of the 



