BUILDING A MONSTER.
Reconstructing a Fossil Ancestor of
the Whales.
The National Museum has just finished
the building of a monster, whose like has
not been seen in the world for at least half
a million years.
It is a zeuglodon—the first one ever
mounted and restored. For a long time
scientists have been puzzling and disputing
over this species of animal, fossil remains
of which are found in large quantities in
Alabama and Mississippi. Specimens have
actually been exhibited as the skeletons of
veritable sea serpents. The creature was
at first supposed to be a reptile, but now it
is known to have been a giant cetacean.
It was an ancestor of the modern whales,
and a remarkable point about it was that it
had legs.
After it had been settled that the beast
was a mammal, some scientific men as-
serted that it belonged to the seal family.
Whether it had legs or not was an open
question. To settle the point, the National
Museum sent an expert, Mr. Charles
Schuchert, to Mississippi, with instructions
to procure a complete skeleton of a zeug-
don if obtainable, sparing neither pains nor
money in the quest. He had no trouble in
finding plenty of the bones, which in some
localities may be dug out of the ground in
quantities with spade and pickax. Unfor-
tunately, they are nearly always in such
poor condition as to be valueless, being
broken up by the action of frost mainly.
When buried bones are permeated by
moisture, a freeze shatters them. However,
Mr. Schuchert succeeded in getting two
fairly good skeletons, which, though lack-
ing some of their parts, were better than
any specimens discovered up to date. One
of them had the bones of both fore legs.
The authorities of the National Museum
thought it would be a good idea to make a
restoration of this fossil whale for the At-
lanta exposition. This task they confided
to the osteologist, Mr. Frederic A. Lucas.
It was a labor of enormous difficulty, re-
quiring the highest order of knowledge. All