50 Years Ago

The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of France. By Glyn Daniel — To win appreciation for some phase of antiquity on the strength of modern excavations is far easier than what has been undertaken here — where the antiquities concerned have been known for centuries, until only yesterday often excavated badly, and celebrated in a literature in which perverse and obsolete terminologies have run riot. Dr. Daniel, supported by his wife, and with backing from many quarters as well as friendly French co-operation, has for long been working towards a systematic account of the megalithic and related stone tombs of France, their form and contents, and their placing in the frame of European prehistory in the third and second millennia B.C., to which in general they belong. This book, by no means his first study of megalithic structures, is his best so far. It is not too hard to read.

From Nature 12 August 1961

100 Years Ago

In the July number of The American Naturalist Dr. O. P. Hay reopens the discussion with regard to the position of the limbs in Diplodocus and other sauropod dinosaurs, criticising the views of those who assert that these reptiles carried themselves in elephantine fashion, and maintaining his own opinion that the general pose was more after the crocodilian style ... Mr. Hay expresses doubts as to whether the erect bird-like posture attributed to the carnivorous dinosaurs of the Jurassic is really true to nature ... In reference to the opinion of Dr. Matthew that Sauropods were too bulky to have lived on land, it is added that “the law to which he gives expression does, of course, prescribe a limit to the size an animal can attain, but who has yet determined what that limit is?”

From Nature 10 August 1911