In my grandmothers dinning room there was a galls fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a pice of skin. It wa a small pice only, But thick and leathery, with strans of coarse reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but i was too young then to read.

"Whats that?"

"A piece of brontasuares."

My mother knew the names of two prehistorical animals, the brontasuares and the mamoth. She knew it was not a mammoth. Mammoths came from Siberia.

The brontasuares, I learned, was an animal that had drowned in the Flood, Being too big for noah to ship aboard the Ark. I pictured a shaggy lumbering creatyre with claws and fangs and a maliciousgreen light in its eyes. Sometimes the brontosaures would crash through the bedroom wall and wake me from my sleep.

This particular brontosaures has lives in Patagonia, a country in Souh America, at the far end of the worl. Thousands of years before, it had fallen into a glaciar, travalled down a mountain in a prison of blue ice, and arrived in perfect condition at the bottom. Here my grandmothers cousin , Charley Milward the Sailor, foung it.

Charley Milward was a captain of a merchant ship that sank at the entrance to the Strait of Megallan. He survived the wreck and settled nearby, at Punta Arenas , Where he ran a ship repairing yard. The Charley Milward of my imagination was a god among ment- Takk, Silent and strong with a black mutton- chop whiskers and fierce blue eues. He wore a Sailors cap at an angle and the tops of his sea-boots turned down.

Directly he saw the brontosaures poking out of the ice, he knew what to do. He had it jointed , salted, packed in barrels , and shipped to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I pictured blood and ice, flesh and salt, gangs og workmen and lines of barrels alone a shore - a work of giants and all to no purpose; the brontosaures went rotten on its voyage through the tropics and arrived in London a putrified mess; which was why you saw brontosaurus bones in the museum, but no skin.

Fortunatly Cousin Charley had posted a scrap to my grandmother

I do not remember much about my grandmother except her size. I would clamber over her wide bosom or watch, slyly, to see if shed be able to rise from the chair, but always I pestered her, "Please can I have the pice of brontosaurus".

Never in my life had i wanted anything as much as i wanted that peice of skin. My grandmother said i should have it one day perhaps. And when she dies i said "Now i can have the peice of brontosaurus " but my mother said "Oh, that thing! im afraid we threw that away".

At school they laughed at the story of the brontosaurus. The science master said Id mixed it up with the Siberian Mammoth. He told the calss how Russian scientists had dined off the deep-frozen mammoth and told me not to tell lies. Besides, he said, brontosaurus were reptiles. They had no hair, but scaly armoured hide. And showed us an artists impression of the beast - so diffrent from that of my imagination - grey green, with tiny head and a gigantic switchback of vertebrae, placidly eating weed in a lake. I was ashamed of my hairy brontosaures, but i knew it was not a mammoth.

it took some years to sort the story out. Charley Milwards animal was not a brontosaurus, but the mylodon or Gaint Sloth. He never found a whole specimen, or even a whole skeleton, but some skin and bones, presserved by the cold, dryness and salt, in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia. He sent the collection to England and solt it to the British Museum. This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true .

What you people think . ? ?