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"This settler, I might add, came to your province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known as Dinosauria, and there's about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I'm wedded to science.
During the chalk period, or "cretaceous epoch," not one of the present great physical features of the globe was in existence. Our great mountain ranges, Pyrenees, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, have all been upheaved since the chalk was deposited, and the cretaceous sea flowed over the sites of Sinai and Ararat.
To return to an example already given: All competent authorities will probably assent to the proposition that physical geology does not enable us in any way to reply to this question Were the British Cretaceous rocks deposited at the same time as those of India, or are they a million of years younger or a million of years older? Is paleontology able to succeed where physical geology fails?
Recent and Pliocene Plutonic Rocks, why invisible. Miocene Syenite of the Isle of Skye. Eocene Plutonic Rocks in the Andes. Granite altering Cretaceous Rocks. Granite altering Lias in the Alps and in Skye. Granite of Dartmoor altering Carboniferous Strata. Granite of the Old Red Sandstone Period. Syenite altering Silurian Strata in Norway. Blending of the same with Gneiss.
Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going south toward the canon, we descend a grand geologic stairway, every shelf or tread of which consists of different formations fifty or more miles broad, from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand feet at the start, across the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the Permian, to the Carboniferous, which is the bottom or landing of the Grand Canon plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet.
They descended in all directions down the hill, and straightway several of the party fell into the snare set by Nature for all misguided midnight ramblers over this part of the cretaceous formation.
Yet we by no means need the evidence of the ancient fossil fauna to establish the antiquity of Man in this part of France. The mere volume of the drift at various heights would alone suffice to demonstrate a vast lapse of time during which such heaps of shingle, derived both from the Eocene and the Cretaceous rocks, were thrown down in a succession of river-channels.
For, as the land went on sinking, and the cretaceous sea widened its area, white mud and chloritic sand were always forming somewhere, but the line of sea-shore was perpetually shifting its position.
Another suggestion is that animals and plants were not "climatically differentiated" until the Cretaceous period; that is to say, that they were adapted to all climates before that time, and then began to be sensitive to differences of climate, and live in different latitudes.
A vast ridge rises along the whole western front of the continent, lifting and draining it, from Alaska to Cape Horn. It is the beginning of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes. Even during the Cretaceous period there had been rich forests of Mesozoic vegetation covering about a hundred thousand square miles in the Rocky Mountains region. Europe and America now begin to show their modern contours.
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