Notes

Abstract

THE newspapers have lately published a big-game hunter's report that a gigantic dinosaurian reptile related to the extinct Brontosaurus and Diplodocus has been seen living1 in the Congo region of Africa. Palaeontologists, however, receive the story with incredulity, and are decidedly of opinion that it must be founded on mistaken observations. The Dinosauria and all their gigantic reptilian contemporaries, whether on land, in the sea, or in the air, disappeared from every part of the world at the end of the Cretaceous period. If any had survived, some fragments of them would ere this have been found in the Tertiary formations which record the progress of. life between that period and the present day. It is no contrary argument to quote Sir Harry Johnston's discovery of the okapi in the Congo forest, for this is merely a kind of ancestral giraffe which is known by fossils to have existed so far north as Greece so recently as the beginning of the Pliocene Tertiary. The okapi is a congruous African animal, but a dinosaur would be an anachronism.