Chapter I: Preface

Mystery and marvel are the gates to that wild world where the Monsters of the past lived out their monstrous lives. Adventure that carries one into those steaming coal forests, into those black and reptile-haunted swamps, that sets one face to face with the sprawling brood of giants, terribly menacing and terribly true, holds a thrill peculiar to itself. So startling, so madly strange seem the conditions that we scarcely dare to believe the adventure true, and then, the slow processes of Time turn one by one the pages of that age-old book, and the most extravagant flight of the imagination is outdistanced by facts.

Out to the waste and desert corners of the earth, men go to read these stories. They find the bones of the colossal gladiators still locked in their Titanic struggle, though that struggle ended in death ten million years ago; they find a ruthless war of tooth and claw made tenfold more ferocious than any combat of living beasts of prey by the huge bulk, and the terrible offensive and defensive weapons of those vast animals that the Earth could no longer tolerate.

There is scarcely a place in all the world where a boy cannot find for himself some tokens of this Age of Monsters, where he cannot himself be the hunter and the captor of strange things. In this book all that is told of that grim past is true and every statement may be taken as scientifically accurate. To show to the boys of the United States the thrill of discovery in their own country, and the splendor of the work that their scientists and museum experts are accomplishing, is the aim and purpose of

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I

KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 1

CHAPTER II

THE MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 28

CHAPTER III

PIRATES OF THE AIR 52

CHAPTER IV

SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 81

CHAPTER V

THE MAD ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 116

CHAPTER VI

ACROSS THE DESERT ON CAMEL-BACK 154

CHAPTER VII

FINDING THE ELEPHANT’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER 187

CHAPTER VIII

THE VALLEY OF FOSSIL WHALES 208

CHAPTER IX

THE MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 237

CHAPTER X

THE THREE-TOED HORSE 277