The earlier groups of Beaked Dinosaurs are found in both Europe and
America, and in the Cretacic the Duck-billed and Armored groups are
represented in both regions. The Horned Dinosaurs, however, are known
with certainty only from North America.
While most of the important fossil specimens in this country have been
found in the West, more fragmentary remains have been found on the
Atlantic sea-board, and it is probable that they ranged all over the
intervening region, wherever they found an environment suited to their
particular needs.
CHAPTER XI.
COLLECTING DINOSAURS.
HOW AND WHERE THEY ARE FOUND.
The visitor who is introduced to the dinosaurs through the medium of
books and pictures or of the skeletons exhibited in the great museums,
finds it hard--well nigh impossible--to realize their existence.
However willing he may be to accept on faith the reconstructions of
the skeletons, the restorations of the animals and their supposed
environment, it yet remains to him somewhat of a fairy-tale, a
fanciful imaginative world peopled with ogres and dragons and
belonging to the unreal "once upon a time" which has no connection
with the ever present workaday world in which we live. Birds and
squirrels, rabbits and foxes belong to this real world because he has
seen them in his walks through the woods; even elephants and
rhinoceroses, though his acquaintance be limited to menagerie
specimens, seem fairly real--although one recalls the farmer's comment
on first seeing a giraffe in the Zoological park: "There aint no sich
animal.
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