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Updated: June 22, 2025
But, at the end of the Triassic period, the movement of depression recommenced in our area, though it was doubtless balanced by elevation elsewhere; modification and development, checked in the one province, went on in that "elsewhere"; and the chief forms of Mammals, Birds and Reptiles, as we know them, were evolved and peopled the Mesozoic continent.
But if Globigerinae, and Terebratula caput-serpentis and Beryx, not to mention other forms of animals and of plants, thus bridge over the interval between the present and the Mesozoic periods, is it possible that the majority of other living things underwent a "sea-change into something new and strange" all at once?
They were stupid, sluggish, unwieldy creatures, swollen parasites upon a luxuriant vegetation, and we shall easily understand their disappearance at the end of the Mesozoic Era, when the age of brawn will yield to an age of brain. The next order of the Deinosaurs is that of the biped vegetarians, the Ornithopods, which gradually became heavily armoured and quadrupedal.
The largest of all known turtles, Archelon, whose home was the great interior Cretaceous sea, was fully a dozen feet in length and must have weighed at least two tons. The skull alone is a yard long. Lizards and snakes do not appear until after the close of the Mesozoic, although their ancestral lines may be followed back into the Cretaceous.
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.
The widespread blotting out of life at the end of Palaeozoic time, and again at the end of Mesozoic times, when myriads of forms were cut off, probably from some convulsion of nature or some cosmic catastrophe; and again during the ice age, when the camel, the llama, the horse, the tapir, the mastodon, the elephant, the giant sloth, became extinct in North America how fared it with our ancestor during these terrible ages?
We may very well believe that more powerful mammals than the primitive Mesozoic specimens were already developed in some part of the earth say, Africa and that the rise of the land gave them a bridge across the Mediterranean to Europe. Probably this happened; but the important point is that the reptiles were already almost extinct.
Not single specimen of any higher, or placental, mammal has yet been found in the whole Mesozoic Era. We must, however, beware of simply transferring to the Mesozoic world the kinds of Monotremes and Marsupials which we know in nature to-day.
To which let us add that, since Hugh Miller penned the passage above quoted, the second of the great gaps he refers to has been very considerably narrowed by the discovery of strata containing Palæozoic genera and Mesozoic genera intermingled.
According to the present chronological arrangement of the rocks, very many genera, often whole tribes of animals, are found as fossils only in the oldest rocks, and have skipped all the others, though found in comparative abundance in our modern world. Very many others have skipped from the Mesozoic down, while still others skip large parts of the series of successive ages.
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