Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days

The book that introduced the public to dinosaurs: sea-lizards, flying dragons, mammoths and the first horse, drawn from life by J. Smit and told by a clergyman-geologist who thought the museum's 'relics of a former world' deserved a storyteller.

Ancient Birds

5 pages in this part of Extinct Monsters.

Ancient Birds (Nor is the value)

"Nor is the value of the doctrine of Evolution to the philosophic thinker diminished by the fact that it applies the same method to the…

Ancient Birds: Archæopteryx

Palæontologists are not without evidence bearing on this subject; so perhaps we cannot do better than state briefly what that evidence is…

Ancient Birds: Marsh

A GIGANTIC DIVER, HESPERORNIS REGALIS. FROM NORTH AMERICA. CRETACEOUS PERIOD. Height 6 feet. the end of the toes must have been between…

Ancient Birds: Zealand

Page and Co., New York. giant birds were perhaps the most grotesque. An emu or a cassowary of the present day looks sufficiently strange by…

Ancient Birds: Dinornis

Dinornis parvus (the dwarf Moa) was only three feet high. 1 Memoir on The Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand. London, 1878. The…

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days (1900) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored plates, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.