may have been the missing link between the ichthyosaurus and the mylodoan. One reason that Mr. Shepherd arrived at this conclusion was because the ichthyosaurus attained a length of one hundred feet and a height of twenty. It had a wonderfully formed eye, which could be adjusted at will so that the animal could see objects some distance away as well as those nearby. Its principal diet was blue mud and it was able, at some seasons of the year, to devour a hill of considerable size in a week. In this connection, it is interesting to note that a parchment found in King Tut's sarcophagus, written by one of his hunters in the dead language, called it selblatkey, translated by a reporter on the staff of the New North as meaning, “Hodag.” The Mylodoan was an animal of prehistoric times, so powerful that he could pull down large trees to get the foliage and limbs growing at the tops.
How to capture the hodag was a real man sized job, and none realized it more fully than the heroic Mr. Shepherd. He ordered a crew of men to dig a large pit, several miles from the point where he had first sighted the animal. This huge excavation, which was fifty feet in diameter and thirty
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