Reptiles and Pine Forests

Reptiles and Pine Forests.

From this statement it will be seen that Lemurian man lived in the age of Reptiles and Pine Forests. The amphibious monsters and the gigantic tree-ferns of the Permian age still flourished in the warm damp climates. Plesiosauri and Icthyosauri swarmed in the tepid marshes of the Mesolithic epoch, but, with the drying up of many of the inland seas, the Dinosauria--the monstrous land reptiles--gradually became the dominant type, while the Pterodactyls--the Saurians which developed bat-like wings-not only crawled on the earth, but flew through the air. The smallest of these latter were about the size of a sparrow; the largest, however, with a breadth of wing of more than sixteen feet, exceeding the largest of our living birds of to-day; while most of the Dinosauria-the Dragons-were terrible beasts of prey, colossal reptiles which attained a length of from forty to fifty feet. ¹ Subsequent excavations have laid bare skeletons of an even larger size. Professor Ray Lankester, at a meeting of the Royal Institution On 7th January, 1904, is reported to have referred to a brontosaurus

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p. 19

skeleton of sixty-five feet long, which had been discovered in the Oolite deposit in the southern part of the United States of America.

As it is written in the stanzas of the archaic Book of Dzyan, "Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying sarpas were added to the creeping things. They that creep on the ground got wings. They of the long necks in the water became the progenitors of the fowls of the air." Modem science records her endorsement. "The class of birds as already remarked is so closely allied to Reptiles in internal structure and by embryonal development that they undoubtedly originated out of a branch of this class . . . . . The derivation of birds from reptiles first took place in the Mesolithic epoch, and this moreover probably during the Trias." ¹

In the vegetable kingdom this epoch also saw the pine and the palm-tree gradually displace the giant tree ferns. In the later days of the Mesolithic epoch, mammals for the first time came into existence, but the fossil remains of the mammoth and mastodon, which were their earliest representatives, are chiefly found in the subsequent strata of the Eocene and Miocene times.

Footnotes

17:1 Ernst Haeckel's "History of Creation," Vol. ii., pp. 22-56.

19:1 Ernst Haeckel's " History of Creation," vol. ii., pp. 226-7.