The Ceratosaur, a
seventeen-foot-long reptile, had hollow bones, and we find this
combination of lightness and strength in several members of the
group. In many respects the group points more or less
significantly toward the birds. The brain is relatively large,
the neck long, and the fore limbs might be used for grasping, but
had apparently ceased to serve as legs. Many of the Theropods
were evidently leaping reptiles, like colossal kangaroos, twenty
or more feet in length when they were erect. It is the general
belief that the bird began its career as a leaping reptile, and
the feathers, or expanded scales, on the front limbs helped at
first to increase the leap. Some recent authorities hold,
however, that the ancestor of the bird was an arboreal reptile.
To the order of the Sauropods belong most of the monsters whose
discovery has attracted general attention in recent years.
Feeding on vegetal matter in the luscious swamps, and having
their vast bulk lightened by their aquatic life, they soon
attained the most formidable proportions. The admirer of the
enormous skeleton of Diplodocus (which ran to eighty feet) in the
British Museum must wonder how even such massive limbs could
sustain the mountain of flesh that must have covered those bones.
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