By the time The Children’s Friend of West Chester, Pennsylvania, presented its readers with a description of the prehistoric world, early works for children on fossils had mostly moved from trying to stuff prehistory into 6,000 years to exploring a much longer and more complex pre-human earth history. In The Ancient World, “Uncle Jacob” does hedge his bets, pointing out that the creatures he’s discussing lived “many ages, perhaps, before the creation of man.” But he is careful to explain the evidence from which geologists shape their theories; and he points out that while prehistoric creatures were physically different from today’s creatures, the geological record shows “a gradual but uniform advance to the present forms of life.”

What’s fun for today’s readers is the wood engraving of gigantic beasts socializing on an ancient shore. It’s not the first picture of dinosaurs to appear in an early American periodical for children, but it certainly is well populated. In the background, pterosaurs flex their wings; on the right, a tiny plesiosaur drags itself across the ground, flanked by long-snouted teleosaurs and an amiable ichthyosaur—a land creature, according to early 19th-century geologists.

The central critters, however, are iguanodons: no-necked, horn-snouted, and thick in body and tail. (That’s a hylaeosaurus directly under the tree, with a megalosaurus in front of the pterosaurs on the right.) It’s a long way from the soft-bodied iguanodon pictured in Robert Merry’s Museum in 1842. By 1872, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had sculpted the magnificent cement monsters displayed in Crystal Palace Park in London, England, beginning in 1854; and his version of dinosaurs was now the model for illustrations.

Quite literally. The creatures and their poses apparently are copied directly from Hawkins’s sculptures. Online photographs of the remaining Crystal Palace Dinosaurs show the two iguanodons—one resting a forefoot on a tree trunk—exactly as they’re pictured here, with the hylaeosaurus and the ichthyosaur. The blobby creatures in the foreground are Hawkins’s labyrinthodons, and his megalosaurus stands placidly under the branches to the right of the tree. The result is a strange sort of Mesozoic Peaceable Kingdom.

http://www.merrycoz.org/ChFrndPA/AncientWorld.xhtml
“The Ancient World,” by “Uncle Jacob” (from The Children’s Friend [West Chester, Pennsylvania], Fourth month 1872; pp. 102-105)

We here have a group of living beings that dwelt upon this world we live in, long, very long ago—many ages, perhaps, before the creation of man—different from those now tenanting its surface, or inhabiting the ocean which covers so large a part of it. These are only found fossil. The word fossil comes from the Latin fossilis and fodio, I dig, literally, any thing dug out of the earth. The term however chiefly refers to organic remains, found in fossiliferous rocks and bone caves.

The history of the succession of these beings is traceable, with some degree of certainty, by a chain of evidence, somewhat like that of the domestic manners of the Egyptians, having been made out by an examination of that picture-writing which has been called hieroglyphic. So the impressions of animal remains, are when turned onto a stony substance, called petrifactions.

The science which treats of the earth’s history, of the causes that have produced change in the material of the earth’s crust, and the changes and modifications which have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature, is known as a prominent branch of Geology.

The origin of fossils was the first subject of inquiry. Fracastoro, in 1520, has the credit of being the first who gave the subject a rational explanation. The primitive rocks, such as granites, lava, basalt and mica-schist have never yet been found to show organic marks even of the faintest kind, and are about all the kinds excluded from the list of fossiliferous rocks.

In Dana’s manual of geology, you can learn the condition, structure and arrangements of rock-masses. I can simply glance at it. The stratified rocks are those made up of a series of layers and strata, very variable in thickness and composition, each strata belonging to a single geological age or period, such as the coal formation, including many strata of sand stone, shales, limestones and conglomerates.

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p. 103

illustration of thick-set dinosaurs

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p. 104

If we now consider the land and water animated with animal and vegetable life—while the crust of the earth is undergoing condensation, and the internal fires in operation, so as to produce extensive upheavals and inundations, so as to overwhelm and bury up extensive sections of the earth’s surface, as earthquakes and volcanoes occasionally do now on a smaller scale. [sic]

Thus an immense section would be wiped out, and the vegetables and animals buried deeply under the soil, solidified into rock or stratified by the floods of water washing over them. Hence we find shells and corals of the ocean, as well as fish and marine animals in mountain masses, by upheavals and sundry causes of structure, as the beach structure, ebb and flow, sand-drift, ripple-mark, wave-mark and mud-cracks, rain-prints, &c.

Suppose a bird walking on a sandy beach impresses the print of its feet. A sudden subsidency or change may leave the sand exposed to become baked or transformed into solid sand rock, a layer of sand or other material subsequently flowed over, will fill the marks, be they what kind they may, and as indelible as rock itself, may, ages after, when split by the stone-cutter, reveal the foot-prints, rain-marks or the like.

Now, let us say a few words respecting our wood cut, which attempts to restore the organic remains to the form of the animal when clothed with flesh and a living being. Notwithstanding, we have examined the creatures figured in Anstead’s Ancient World, Lyell’s, Dana’s and several other works with illustrations, of such restored animals, we fail to recognize but few of the large list of fossil remains, among which are the Megatherium Cuvieri, which was over five feet wide, and its body twelve feet long and eight feet high; its feet were a yard in length and terminated by formidable compressed claws of immense size; its tail was of great length, larger than that of any other known mammal; the head was relatively small; this was a singular and enormous animal. The Glyptodon (carved-tooth), also an extinct gigantic quadruped, covered with a tesselated osseous armor, the size of a rhinocerous. The Palæotherium, of which about twelve species have been found; this had 28 complex molar teeth, 4 canines and 12 incisors.

The Palæosaurus, a genus of extinct lizards, characteristic of the magnesian conglomerate. Palæontology, a compound word from the Greek ancient and being and discourse, is that branch of zoological science which treats of fossil organic remains. The Megalosaurus, a gigantic lizard or saurian discovered in the oolitic slate, measuring from 40 to 50 feet in length. The Anoplotherium commune (Cuv.), is about the size of a wild boar, but longer in the body, with the head of an oblong form and a tail of considerable thickness; their canine teeth were short and feeble, un-

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p. 105

fitted for weapons of offence. The Lophiodon mammalia between the Tapirus and Rhinoceros.

The Anthracotherium, the charcoal beast, approximating to the size and character of the hog; others approaching the dimensions of a hippopotamus. There are seven species known, and so we might write pages on the remains of the winged creatures, birds and reptiles of most singular shape, shells and plants, of which no species are now found on the face of the earth, together with others yet existing. I can not stop to describe the fossil elephants and other monsters of the ancient world. The fossil remains of birds are very limited; the enormously large bird, hence named Dinornis, from the Greek (deinos) when standing erect, must have been 10 feet high or more.

It would seem that in the earlier periods of animal existence, their dimensions were much greater than those which now exist; many remains are found in the cretaceous strata, green-sand, &c. There are a host of the gigantic reptiles described; on the whole, however, the geological naturalist enumerating the different groups of animal remains, and comparing them with those of more recent and also of more ancient date, will be struck with many manifest signs of approximation to the existing condition, and may trace a gradual but uniform advance to the present forms of life.

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