United States or Anguilla ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
One fossilised Ichthyosaur of the weaker-toothed variety has been found with the remains of two hundred Belemnites in its stomach. It is a flash of light on the fierce struggle and carnage which some recent writers have vainly striven to attenuate. The eyes, again, which may in the larger animals be fifteen inches in diameter, are protected by a circle of radiating bony plates.
These Belemnites flourished in prodigious abundance in the seas of the mesozoic, or secondary, age of the world's geological history; but no trace of them has been found in any of the tertiary deposits, and they appear to have died out towards the close of the mesozoic epoch.
Belemnites are generally found in immense numbers together, especially in the marlstone quarries of the Midlands, and in the lias cliffs of Dorsetshire.
Similar elongated processes have been also observed to extend from the shells of some Belemnites discovered by Dr. The arenaceous limestone which passes under this name is generally grouped as a member of the Oxford clay, in which it forms, in the south-west of England, lenticular masses, 8 or 10 feet thick, containing at Kelloway, in Wiltshire, numerous casts of ammonites and other shells.
We turn to the seas, and find an equal carnage among some of its most advanced inhabitants. The great cuttlefish-like Belemnites and the whole race of the Ammonites, large and small, are banished from the earth. The fall of the Ammonites is particularly interesting, and has inspired much more or less fantastic speculation.
In proof of this he called attention to the entire absence of Ammonites, Belemnites, Brachiopoda, Echinodermata, Corals, and other marine fossils, so characteristic of the Cretaceous rocks above, and of the Oolitic strata below, and to the presence in the Weald of Paludinae, Melaniae, Cyrenae, and various fluviatile shells, as well as the bones of terrestrial reptiles and the trunks and leaves of land-plants.
"Oh, dear, no!" he interrupted himself. "I was farther along than that! Absence of marine saurians? Oh, yes! "Absence of marine saurians," he resumed glibly, "Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs so abundant in the in the Cretaceous of Ammonites and Belemnites," he persisted heroically.
Word Of The Day