ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
Brazil to be persuaded that that continent had never 
been submerged under a sea; on the contrary, it must 
have been the oven of the world. The volcanic activity 
which must have taken place in that part of the world — 
it was not a separate continent in those days — was quite, 
as I have said, beyond human conception. This does not 
mean that at later periods there may not have been tem¬ 
porary lakes — as, for instance, in the spot where we 
encamped that night — or portions of country which had 
become flooded, upon the cooling of the earth, and sub¬ 
sequently became drained and dry again. 
A wonderful surprise awaited me that day. To the 
north of my camp was a peculiar round mound. I 
climbed it, and what was my astonishment in the short 
ascent to find near the summit, among a lot of lava pellets, 
marble fragments, crystals, and great lumps of iron ore, 
a number of vertebrae from the tail and spine of a giant 
reptile! The vertebrae had been disjointed and scattered 
somewhat about by wind and water, but there they were: 
the smaller ones on the side of the hill, the larger on the 
summit, which led me to believe that the animal had 
crouched on the top of the hill when dying. Some of the 
fossil vertebrae were so large and heavy that I hardly had 
the strength to lift them up. The bones — petrified — 
were of a beautiful white. Many of them had, unfor¬ 
tunately, become so fractured as to make identification 
difficult. On following the line of the dorsal vertebrae, 
somewhat scattered about, I came upon some vertebrae 
which appeared to me to be cervical vertebrae; and then, 
behold my joy! in searching around the summit of the 
mound I perceived the skull. The skull was so big and 
heavy that I could not carry it away, but I took several 
photographs and careful drawings of it from all sides. 
It was curiously shaped, quite unlike any other fossil 
skull I have seen. The cranial region proper was ex¬ 
tremely short, with smallish, round orbits rather low down 
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