Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 302, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1916 — IS MONSTER COW STILL ON EARTH? [ARTICLE]

IS MONSTER COW STILL ON EARTH?

DID ONCE, AND WAS CHAMPION MILKER Amazing Ars the Remains of Prehistoric Animal* Unearthed In South America. How would you like to own a cow twenty feet high and forty-seven feet long, with udders enough to give twenty time* the quantity of milk offered up by the champion milkers of the day? Or to live In a land where a rat la the size of'a St. Bernhard dog, and you were obliged to keep a cat the size of a tiger and a dog the size of a horse to chase away the pesky rodentsT And where, for amusement, you could enjoy the antics of yoar little pet horse, the size of a dog? Sounds like a dream of an opium fiend, doesn’t it? Makes you think of Rider Haggard or a tale by H. O. Wells. But such conditions once were undergone by mere man, and not such a tremendous number of years ago, either. Indeed/ so comparatively recent was it that there is reason to believe that the grypotherium —as the antehistorical cow was termed — still exists, and that somewhere on the broad plateaus of Patagonia it frisks about the landscape, whisking its fifteen-foot tail above its ten-foot legs and enjoying life to full. In 1897 Dr. Moreno, director of the La Plata museum in Argentina, discovered remains on the boundary between Chili and Patagonia that led to the unearthing of the remains of a grypotherium in such an excellent state of preservation that practically the entire skeleton now is being mounted in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Moreno discovered pieces of a tough, thick skin, with bony patches and three-inch-long hair, hanging on a tree near Last Hope Inlet. Investigation proved that government officials had secured the remainder. Further search led to a cave where the skin'hfui been found originally, and, when three feet of debris had been dug from the bottom, the remains were unearthed. More skin was discovered. There were also the bones of the animal two awls made from the leg bones of : dog; the skull of a prehistoric man, and evidence that the grypotherium hflit been maintained in a state of domesticity.

There was a quantity of cut hay. There was the skeleton of a rat the •ize of a dog; of a horse no bigger; of a tiger-sized cat and a horse-sized dog. Ashes and charred wood showed that the primitive occupant had understood the methods of fire and it is believed that the grypotherlum was kept exactly as a cow today. The huge prehistoric creature had an extraordinary series of udders in the region of the thorax and would htfve yielded the milk of twenty cows. Conditions led Dr. Moreno to believe that the life of the entire family had been snuffed out by a falling bowlder, which crashed off from the upper -portion of the cave and buried them beneath it. * With the change of thne the average Sypotherium, following the order of scent, altered its size and shape to meet, altered conditions of nature. The result is found in the little tree sloth so common today in tropic countries. But the grypotherlum was as nought compared to the remains of a dinosaur recently unearthed by Prof. Bari Douglas, of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, in Jensen, Utah. The specimen is perfect and the biggest ever unearthed in this country measuring 135 feet in length, with a neck 65 feet long, and thigh bones 3 feet in diameter. Which would mean that the animal could- lean against a ten-story building and pick cherries off the flagpole or stretch half a city block in length and fill the open space from pavement to pavement. Of course, the frolicsome grypotberium wasn’t quite as cumbersome as that around the caveman’s home. If it stood upright on its hind legs It would have reached only to the top of a four-story building, isn’t so bad when one considers it. How the caveman milked his pet is a question involving higher mathematics as complicated as those employed by the builders of the pyramid* It is Inferred that he borrowed the outfit of a friendly lightning rod agent or else climbed a tree. But one thing is certain. Milk {•mines never-bothered the caveman.