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In the shallow water along its shores, and on the islands rising but a few feet above the waves, they saw all kinds of amphibians and sea-monsters. Many of these were almost the exact reproduction in life of the giant plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, and elasmosaurs, whose remains are preserved in the museums on earth.
Your brains must be one fossiliferous deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped together, as the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And therefore I like to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to myself.
Then, by slow degrees, the mountains of Brazil, with their mines of glittering gems, appeared above the surface of the waters, amid which huge reptile-like whales, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs buffeted the billows, and vast saurians, lizards, and alligators, rivalling the elephant in bulk, and twice his length such as the megalosaurus, the iguanodon, and teleosaurus crawled along the slimy shores; while giant birds, with wide-spreading feet, stalked across the newly-formed plains, or flew shrieking, with wings of prodigious expanse skimming the glittering sea, the lords paramount of this lower world.
There were huge tortoises too, paddling about among these other reptiles, which Perry said were Plesiosaurs of the Lias. I didn't question his veracity they might have been most anything.
The chronicle of the later Cretaceous is a story of devastation. The reduction of the cyeads is insignificant beside the reduction or annihilation of the great animals of the Mesozoic world. The skeletons of the Deinosaurs become fewer and fewer as we ascend the upper Cretaceous strata. The Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs vanish from the waters.
The thing must have been sixteen or eighteen feet in length and closely resembled pictures I had seen of restored plesiosaurs of the lower Jurassic. It charged us as savagely as a mad bull, and one would have thought it intended to destroy and devour the mighty U-boat, as I verily believe it did intend. We were moving slowly up the river as the creature bore down upon us with distended jaws.
There were huge tortoises too, paddling about among these other reptiles, which Perry said were Plesiosaurs of the Lias. I didn't question his veracity they might have been most anything.
These sea monsters disported along the Pacific shore over northern California in Triassic times, and the bones of immense members of the family occur in the Jurassic strata of Wyoming. Like whales and seals, the ichthyosaurs were descended from land vertebrates which had become adapted to a marine habitat. PLESIOSAURS were another order which ranged throughout the Mesozoic.
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