The red book of animal stories/When the World was Young

For works with similar titles, see When the World was Young.

WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG

It is always very difficult for us really to feel that people in other places are working and playing exactly as we are doing ourselves, and that when we are dead everything will go on as if we had never been alive at all. But it is even harder for us to believe that for more thousands of years than anyone can count, the earth went on its way round the sun without numbering one single man among its inhabitants.

Not that our little planet was empty and silent, because men were not there to shout and clamour. Anyone looking down from the moon would have seen our world very much as we see it now. There were mountains and seas, trees, and flowers; there were wet days and fine days, high tides and low ones. To be sure, the observer sitting in the moon would not have been looking at the very same mountains and seas that we gaze at now. At one time, countries, which are now dry land, were covered by an ocean; at another, great tracts, that are at present islands, were joined to the continent itself, while, on the other hand, peninsulas (such as India) were divided by a sea from the mainland. In some cases, mountain ranges had not been formed at all, and the rivers ran in very different courses from what they do to-day.

Well, all these seas and continents were the homes of vast numbers of creatures, some bearing a strong likeness to the animals and reptiles with which we are familiar, others that would be absolutely strange to our eyes. They did not all live at the same time either. One race would hold sway for more ages than we can guess, and then would die out, perhaps affected by some change of climate, and by-and-by another would take its place, also to disappear when its turn came.

Now, how can we know anything at all about animals which died thousands of years ago? In two ways. From their bones (long since become like a stone in substance), or the impressions of them which have been preserved in the rocks, and from the bodies which have sometimes been found quite complete, with skin, hair, and even eyes, in the frozen marshes of Northern Asia.

But the discovery of creatures in this condition is very rare. In general, scientific men who study the subject have to be satisfied with the skeleton, or with detached parts of the frame, and with this help they have worked wonders. One of the most important things in building up the history of fossil animals is the teeth, and with the aid of these it is possible to find out whether the dead monster fed upon flesh, or upon herbs and leaves, or even if it preferred the wood of the branches. A lightness in the upper part of the body, combined with a small head and short forelegs, tells us that the quadruped could rear itself up on its hind legs, like a kangaroo, while in creatures of the elephant kind, which own a long nose or proboscis, we shall find that the neck is so short that it could not reach its food in the trees or on the ground without help of this sort.

Most of these animals lived long long ago, thousands of years before we have any idea of; but one or two survived till a race of men inhabited the earth, or at any rate some parts of it. The best known of these great creatures is the mammoth, which was very like an elephant in shape, and like him had huge ivory tusks, curving inwards and upwards, instead of being comparatively straight. Sometimes the curve nearly made a complete circle, as in the case of a mammoth skeleton now in

SECURING A MAMMOTH

the St. Petersburg Museum, where the tusks measure nine feet six inches; but a semicircle was more common. The mammoth skeletons are usually over nine feet in height, and fifteen feet in length, and when we add muscles and skin, we shall have a very large beast indeed.

The modern elephant is only to be found in hot countries, and is confined to Africa and to India. The mammoth, on the contrary, preferred a cold or temperate climate, and roamed all over Europe, North America, Siberia, and the northern part of Africa. There is scarcely a single English county, except perhaps Cornwall, where its bones have not been found, in the soft clays and gravels and soil washed down by the rivers in the far-off days, when the earliest race of man appeared on the earth.

How strange it would seem to us now, taking a walk along the wooded banks of the Thames near Oxford, to stumble suddenly on a gigantic mammoth, tearing down the sweet young branches with his trunk! He must have looked a huge monster, indeed, with his powerful tusks, often nearly eleven feet long, and his thick coat adapted to face the snows of England and Russia, and the still greater cold of North Siberia. Over his dark grey skin the soft brown wool curled closely, and, above that, was an outer garment of long, almost black hair. Big and clumsy as an elephant is, a mammoth was bigger and clumsier still; but he was by no means the only great animal that found England in those times a pleasant place to live in; for, in many instances, the bones of the hippopotamus and a woolly rhinoceros are to be seen buried beside him, while lions, tigers, and hyenas had not yet wandered to the south.

In those days, as in these, the elephant tribe, of which the mammoth was one, fed on vegetable substances, and even in Siberia, where such enormous numbers of their frozen remains have been discovered, there was obviously some sort of food for them. Birches, willows, and fir trees of various kinds, grew then, as now, in those bleak countries, and when the creatures became tired of eating soft things, they had only to uproot a tree, or tear off one of the branches, and crunch up the wood between their strong teeth. Of course, in African forests, the size of the trees often baffles even the strength of an elephant; but in northern climates, such as Siberia, few could stand against a mammoth, the weight of whose tusks commonly amounted to 320 lbs.!

Now it seems wonderful to us that, after so many ages have passed, we can still find the skeletons of these animals, and, indeed, this can only happen in certain ways. In order to preserve a skeleton or even a whole body, it is absolutely needful that it should be kept shut off from either air or water, or not only its flesh, but its bones, will in time crumble away and vanish. This occurs when the animal dies above ground, or is drowned in some lake or river with a sandy, gravelly bottom; and in rocks made up of these substances we shall find but few fossils, or traces of plant and animal life. But if the bed of the lake should happen to be made of mud or clay, or something into which neither air nor water can penetrate, the body of the creature which has got stuck in swimming, or has been somehow caught fast and held, will gradually sink down till he is entirely covered. By-and-by the mud which wraps him round will have become solid rock, keeping within it one of the secrets of a world gone by. Peat will also preserve bodies that have fallen into it, to be dug out, ages after, fresh and young, and—in the case of men and women—with even their clothes undecayed; but one of the most usual means of preservation consists in freezing the bodies, and thus excluding the air.

The great frozen marshes of the north of Siberia teem with remains of mammoths, which have either died on the spot or been carried down by the floods of the mighty rivers. In warm summers, or during heavy gales, these marshes become thawed or broken up, and sometimes one of the huge creatures that has been lying buried, for anything we know, since the days of the Great Pyramid, or even of the first Emperor of China, may be seen floating on the stream. On one occasion a fat, comfortable mammoth, thirteen feet high, with a thick hairy coat, and wide open eyes, was found standing where the earth had given way under him in one of the marshes in north-east Siberia. He had been frozen in the spot where he fell, and had remained there, no one knows how long, till the whole surface of the land had been torn up by the raging waters of the swollen river. The Russian who discovered the mammoth longed to bring it home; but the body, when exposed to the warm air, soon began to fall away, and all he could do was to cut off the tusks, and examine his food, of which traces were still existing in the stomach. By these he made out that the mammoth had feasted for the last time on young fir cones and pine needles, and then, well fed and happy, had gone to his death. The same fate very nearly befell his discoverers too; for, in their excitement, the men did not notice that the ground was giving way under them also, and had not the boat been luckily at hand, the river Indigirka would have carried men as well as mammoth out to sea.^[1]

In searching for remains of fossil animals, we must never forget that the topmost rocks are always, except where they have been heaved up by accident, the newest and latest formed, and, from this fact, it is possible to tell which creatures lived at the same time, and which succeeded the other. Now, ages before there were any mammoths on the earth there existed a monster very like him in appearance, but differing from him in three ways. First, he had no hair on his body; then his teeth were simpler than those of the mammoth, and though, like him, the animal lived on branches and trees of various kinds, he could grind rougher and coarser food. Lastly, instead of one pair of tusks, many of the species had two, one in each jaw.

This variety of proboscis-bearing or long-nosed quadruped of the elephant tribe was called the Mastodon. He lived in America as well as in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and could suit himself well to any climate, though, from the many remains that have been found in the temperate zones, he seems to have disliked extremes, either of hot or cold. The mastodon was a huge creature, the skeleton measuring as much as eleven feet in height, with long straight tusks that have been known to stand out as much as ten feet beyond its head. From the fact that stone arrow-heads have been discovered lying round the skeleton in America, and from stories told by the Indians, it seems likely that the mastodon was living in the New World, at any rate when the earliest men peopled the land; but on our side of the Atlantic it had probably died out long before.

Anyone who examines the skeletons that have been pieced together by those who have made bones their study, will be struck by two things—the immense size and clumsiness of the dwellers both on earth and in the sea, ages and ages before man was dreamed of, and also by certain resemblances with several forms that survive up to the present moment. Besides the animals with long trunks, there are monsters with long heads, all stuck with bony nobs, and in shape like the rhinoceros. These skeletons are mostly found in North America, and teach us that the beasts to whom they belonged must have been very nearly as big as elephants, to whose legs theirs bear some likeness. Their bodies were very heavy and awkward, and their eyes small; they had an odd number of toes on their hoofs, and very small brains. Altogether, it is easy to understand how, when the rain descended, and the floods came, in those far-off times, long before the woolly rhinoceros was feeding with the mammoth on the

MEGATHERIA

banks of Siberian rivers, the stupid, awkward animals should have been unable to place themselves in safety, and got swallowed up in the mud of the lake.

Then, too, but much later in date, the great pampas or plains of South America were the home of the ancestors of the Sloth tribe—Megatheria by name—animals eighteen feet in length, whose bones are found in the river deposits. As in all animals that can, stand on their hind legs, the lower limbs and back were immensely strong, while the thick tail acted as ballast; the very thigh bone is three times as thick as that of an elephant. Like the modern Sloth, the Megatherium had no teeth in front, but it probably possessed a long and flexible tongue, which it used to curl round branches of trees and tear them down. It was also able to dig its sharp, powerful claws into the trunk of a tree, and with a mighty heave of its body to loosen the roots, and by repeating this process three or four times the tree would fall to the ground, and the particular morsel on which the Megatherium had set its heart would be within its reach.

Further back still we find that birds and mammals have not yet come into being, but, instead, their places are taken by a strange kind of flying reptile, whose wings were more like those of a bat than a bird, and often measured twenty-five feet. The name of Pterodactyl has been given to this extraordinary creature, which resembles some of the queer fancies men used to carve on churches rather than anything we ever see now. The pterodactyl had teeth, but no feathers, and could swim as well as fly. As to its food, we guess from its teeth that it lived chiefly upon fish, though it may sometimes have swooped down, when flying, on little animals, or even have pecked at fruit.

But besides the pterodactyls, there existed at the same period, which has been called the Age of the Reptiles, vast swarms of creatures whose forms seemed to be made up of a large number of other species. In many ways they were most like crocodiles, but in other respects, again, they remind us of ostriches. To this class Naturalists have given the name of Dinosaurs, from two Greek words, which mean ‘terrible lizards.’

All the tribe were alike in one way, for they had four legs; but in some the structure of the bones shows that the Dinosaur could, when it chose, stand upright, while other varieties, such as the Brontosaur, must have been compelled, or at any rate must have preferred, to walk on all fours. This monstrous beast was about sixty feet long, its skeleton has always been found on the bank of a lake or river, and it probably fed on water plants. It had a long neck, which would enable it to rear its head out of the water and see whether the coast was clear of its enemies, and a long tail, which was a great help in swimming. But when on land it must have been difficult indeed for an animal of such huge bulk to get out of the way when attacked, and still more difficult for it to escape detection, as every one of its tracks measures a whole square yard.

About the same time that the Brontosaurus was wallowing among the reeds of the lakes and rivers which covered the tract of country now called Colorado, one of his distant cousins might have been met with any day in the Weald of Sussex, had there been anyone living on the earth to take a walk! This particular reptile has been given the name of Iguanodon, from a peculiarity of its teeth. The largest kind known is thirty feet long, from its nose to the end of its powerful tail, and when walking, as it always did, on its hind legs, was as tall as a very big elephant. “From the hollowness of its limb bones it was able to move more lightly than some of the other animals whose bones were solid throughout, and this was very necessary, as, unlike many of these old lizards, the Iguanodon had no sharp knots or spines on its skin to ward off the attacks of its flesh-eating foes. So, when standing as high as it did, it saw one of these huge monsters in the distance, it had time to get out of the way, either in the water, where its strong tail and hind legs would soon carry it out of reach, or it could find shelter in some hiding-place on land. The Iguanodon itself was quite a harmless creature, with a smooth skin.

STEGOSAURUS

It had hands with four fingers, and a sharp, spiky sort of thumb, whose use has not yet been discovered. The toes on its back feet were only three, but they made up in size and strength what they wanted in number.

A great contrast to the smooth-skinned Iguanodon was the Stegosaurus, traces of whose skeleton have been unearthed at Swindon, but are found far more frequently in the Rocky Mountains. It is, perhaps, quite the most curious in shape of all these strange old animals. Its body forms an arch, with a pair of long solid legs not far from the centre, and another pair of quite little ones near its small head. Right down the middle of its back, stretching from its head to its spiny tail, was a ridge of huge bony plates, like colossal ivy leaves, the centre ones measuring two or three feet across. It seems to have been about twenty-five or thirty feet long; its sense of smell was very acute, its eyes were large, and could absorb much light, and it ought to have been very clever, as it had two sets of brains, one in the usual place, and the other, ten times bigger, near the thigh. As may be imagined, the Stegosaurus (or ‘lizard with a roof’) was very heavy to move, and most likely found it pleasanter to pass most of its time in the water, which, being of more weight than the air, would support its great bones better. But when on land it could defend itself from its enemies by the help of its tail, which had four pairs of strong sharp spikes, calculated to keep the most bloodthirsty animal at bay. Its own food, as shown by its teeth, was soft juicy plants.

There is no time to say much of the largest of all the Dinosaurs, which has been found in America, and measured more than eighty feet. Its thigh bone alone was taller than a man, and if it walked upright it would certainly have been thirty feet high. Nor can we linger over the fish lizards, which came before all these, or the lobster-like creatures that lived before them, or over the crocodiles, some eighteen feet long, found in the new red sandstone and later rocks, or over the tapirs, or many more. But we must just glance at a few birds which are now extinct, partly through the merciless hunting down by man, and partly owing to natural causes, with which he has nothing to do.

As far as can be gathered from the rocks, the birds (which did not come into being till the great order of the reptiles had mostly died out) were a good deal less numerous than the creatures who had gone before them. But this may be partly accounted for by the fact that their bodies, being lighter, would more easily float on the surface of lakes and rivers, and would be eaten by fishes, or decomposed by the air, instead of being sealed up in mud, like those of larger and heavier animals.

The very earliest kind of bird that has so far been found at all—it was in a Bavarian rock of late limestone, and is known as the Archaeopteryx—resembles, in many respects, the family of reptiles. It has, to be sure, a long jointed tail, and teeth in its jaws, and other features in common with them; but then it possesses feathers, even on its tail, and the brain of a bird. Teeth were not at all uncommon in the jaws of these early birds, and the long-billed, fish-eating, Hesperornis, of North America, had a whole set that grew afresh when the old ones fell away. The Hesperornis was between five and six feet high, and is found in the chalk rocks. It was a famous diver, and had wings of a sort; but whatever use they may have been on land, they certainly could have been of none either in air or water.

In New Zealand there existed, until comparatively lately, several ‘running’ birds, of the kind of which the ostrich, the cassowary and the emu are the last specimens surviving in the world. The most celebrated of these is the Moa, whose bones are found only along the banks of streams at present flowing, showing that the surface of the land has not changed since they were buried there. The Moa could not have been less than fourteen feet, as its leg bone is nearly three times as long as that of a man. Some of the tribe were slight and swift, others like the Dinornis Elephantopus, shorter and stronger. The wing bones of all were so small as to be hardly noticeable, and their bills were invariably short. Whether they could sing or not we do not know—probably not. In some cases a few bones, with feathers attached to them, have been discovered, and from these feathers, combined with a long neck and small head, we gather that the Moa must have resembled an emu or cassowary in appearance.

When New Zealand was first discovered the Maoris found the country, greatly to their surprise, to be nearly empty of land animals belonging to the mammal class, although it swarmed with running birds. Some of them, like the great Dinornis, were as tall as an elephant; but, large or small, their wings were always very tiny and quite useless, and their bones, developed by much running, particularly strong.

The nearer we get to the history of the earth as we know it, the more numerous become the birds, some of which, though now extinct, have lived on till recent years. The remains of a huge bird, called the Epiornis, which in size rivalled the great Dinornis, have been found among the soil brought down by the rivers of Madagascar. Very often a huge egg has lain beside these bones, measuring thirteen or fourteen inches across. This must surely have been the ‘roc’s egg,’ which the Genius refused to give to Aladdin, which was six times as big as that of an ostrich, and capable, says Professor Owen, of containing 148 eggs of a hen!

Travellers in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth century have left us some interesting tales about a short fat bird, then inhabiting Mauritius and the neighbouring islands, known as the Dodo. And it might have been living there yet, had it not been for men’s insane passion for killing. The Dodo was rather bigger than a swan, with a short stumpy tail, decorated, like the little wings, with a bunch of soft feathers like those of an ostrich. Its legs were very short also, and this fact, combined with the weight of its body, rendered it difficult for the Dodo to escape from its pursuers. The flesh seems to have been more appreciated by Dutch sailors than English ones, if we are to judge from the description of our explorer, who declares it ‘was better to the eye than to the stomach.’ The last Dodo was seen in 1681.

When we visit a zoological gardens, it is impossible not to be struck with the fact that certain of the animals that we are looking at seem strange to our minds, as if they had come from a world of which we know nothing, and belonged to a state of life we could never understand. We may be gazing at all the beasts equally for the first time, but we know exactly what to make of a lion, a puma, or a zebra; while an elephant, a rhinoceros, or a

PTERODACTYL

kangaroo, fills us with thoughts that we can hardly explain even to ourselves.

Now, perhaps these vague feelings arise from these creatures really representing the life of such ages ago that nobody can even venture to guess at a date. As will be seen, from the short account given above, of animals that are now extinct, they none of them were exactly like the beasts and birds to be met with now, but they were like enough to them to show that they belonged to the same race. We all have felt a curious sensation when we have met an old gentleman or lady who persists in wearing the dress of their youth, or in clinging to habits long out of date. Well, this is precisely the impression produced by animals who have modified their ways and appearances as little as possible in conformity to a new state of things. Nature, as we learn if we study her, never works in jumps. She takes into consideration the kind of world the creature has to live in, the kind of food he has to eat, the kind of enemy he has to fight with, and everything about him is fitted for this special life, and this only. If conditions change, he slowly and gradually, but surely, changes with them. Some animals take much longer to adapt themselves than others, just as the Chinese have stuck to their own ways for thousands of years, while, in a quarter of a century, the Japanese have made themselves more European than the dwellers in Europe. Now, the badger, the elephant, and many more, are the Chinese of the kingdom of animals. The very sight of them makes us put our clocks back, and try to fancy what the earth was like in those far-away days. As we have seen, the elephant race lived under various names, in different regions from those where it dwells now, and developed a suitable skin-covering to protect it from the cold. At one time a great beast, in shape like an elephant, but with a certain relationship, too, to the Tapir family, wandered about a large part of Europe, and passed much of its existence in rivers or lakes. The lower jaw of this Dinotherium bent downward, and ended in two heavy tusks, which would only have been an encumbrance on land, but may have been very useful in grubbing up the roots of plants from the bottom of the river. Or he may have dug his tusks firmly into the bank and pulled himself out of the water with their help.

Then, as soon as the rhinoceros quitted the cold regions of the north, and went to live in Africa, he dropped the woolly coat that had protected him, and appeared from henceforward in his dark grey skin, which is much less becoming. As to crocodiles, the oldest known form, found in the new red sandstone, could have looked but little different from our friends of to-day.^[2]

It is an established fact that large animals more quickly become extinct than small ones. Their families are fewer, to begin with, and they need more food and water; it is also more difficult for them to hide, and to escape from their enemies. For these reasons, among others, vast hordes of huge monsters have died out, and given place to smaller ones, both in land and sea. And no doubt, if the world goes on long enough, other changes will take place; the old order of things will be swept away, and men will some day be puzzling over the skeletons of cats and the bones of canary birds.

1. Extinct Monsters.
2. From Owen’s Palæontology; Manual of Paleontology, by Nicholson and Lyddeker, and Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters.