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To the order of the Sauropods belong most of the monsters whose discovery has attracted general attention in recent years. Feeding on vegetal matter in the luscious swamps, and having their vast bulk lightened by their aquatic life, they soon attained the most formidable proportions.
Quite commonly the brain of one of these enormous animals is no larger than a man's fist. This inferior "brain" was from ten to twenty times as large as the brain in the skull. It would, however, be fully occupied with the movement of the monstrous limbs and tail, and the sex-life, and does not add in the least to the "mental" power of the Sauropods.
We find their remains in all these regions. Another stock is believed to have arisen in America. Each of them then gave birth to an order of quadrupeds. In the spreading waters and rich swamps of the later Triassic some of the Theropods were attracted to return to an amphibious life, and became the vast, sprawling, ponderous Sauropods, the giants in a world of giants.
They were, however, sluggish and stupid monsters, with smaller brains even than the Sauropods. Such, in broad outline, was the singular and powerful family of the Mesozoic Deinosaurs.
Its thigh-bone was sixty-four inches long and twenty-seven inches in circumference at the shaft. And in this order of reptiles, it must be remembered, the bones are solid. To complete the picture of the Sauropods, we must add that the whole class is characterised by the extraordinary smallness of the brain. The twenty-ton Brontosaur had a brain no larger than that of a new-born human infant.
Many of these Deinosaurs must have measured more than a hundred feet from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail, and stood about thirty feet high from the ground. The European Sauropods did not, apparently, reach the size of their American cousins so early did the inferiority of Europe begin but our Ceteosaur seems to have been about fifty feet long and ten feet in height.
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