Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1882 — A Prehistoric Monster. [ARTICLE]

A Prehistoric Monster.

If I were to speak after the common fashion of the elephant as “a mammoth,” of the rhinoceros as a Titan, and the hippopotamus as Behemoth, you might fairly charge me with having forgotten that these animals," big as we think them, are really, after all, only the pigmies of other species. But I have pot forgotten it, for before me lies a paragraph announcing the discovery in Siberia of one of those colossal animals which nature is very fond of dropping in, in a staccato way, just to keep our pride down, and to remind us, we creatures of a degenerate growth, what “winter” meant in the years gone by, and what kind of a person an inhabitant of the earth then was. He had to be very big, indeed, very strong and very warmly clad, to be called the fittest in the glacial period, and to survive the fierce assaults of the paltoolithic cold. The rhinoceros, therefore exoeeds by some cubits the stature of the modern beast, and is also by some tons heavier. It appears that an affluent of the Tana river was making alterations in its course, and in so doing cut away its banks, revealing the imbedded presence of a truly Titanic pachyderm, which, for want of a fitter name, has been temporarily called “a rhinoceros.” But it is such a creature that if it were to show itself now in the swamps of Assam or on the plains of Central Africa, it would terrify off its path all the species of the present day, whether one-horned or two-horned, and make no more of an obstinate elephant than an avalanche does of a goat-herd’s hut that happens to stand in the line of its advance. At one time the whole skeleton of the great dead thing stood revealed to human eyes, such an apocalypse of mummy as should have had some evangelist "like Prof. Owen close at hand to translate it to the world; a vision of dry bones fit for the prophet of South Kensington himself. Unfortunately, however, there is no large choice of professors in Siberia. They are wise beyond measure in Arctic suffering, and graduates in the miseries of cold, but they know very little about fossils. So the stream that was cutting away its banks took the old rhinoceros in its day’s work, and cut the monster of the past away, too. Its head was eventually rescued, and so was one foot, said to be at Irkutsk. Ex pede Herculem. This foot, if set down upon one of the rhinoceroses of modern times, would have flattened it as smooth as the philosopher’s tub rolled out those naughty boys of Corinth who had ventured to tickle the cynic through the bung-hole with a straw. Beside its size, the huge monster in question asserts its superiority over existing species by being clothed in long hair, a fleece to guard it against the climate in which it lived, and from which even the tremendous panoply of the nineteenth century rhinoceros could not sufficiently protect the wearer. Thus, clad in a woolly hide and colossal in physique, the Siberian mammal not only lived, but lived happily, amid snowy glaciers that would have frozen the polar bear and made icicles of arctic foxes. — Harper's Weekly.