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Updated: May 22, 2025
With the chapadao of the Parecis plateau we came to a land of sand and clay, dotted with lumps of sandstone and pieces of petrified wood; this, according to Oliveira, is of Mesozoic age, possibly cretaceous and similar to the South African formation. There are geologists who consider it as of Permian age.
"A snag in the shape of extra hard rock," replied the tunnel contractor. "Briefly, Paleozoic rocks make up the eastern part of the Andean Mountains in Peru, while the western range is formed of Mesozoic beds, volcanic ashes and lava of comparatively recent date.
Again, whilst Bain found fossil plants in his reptiliferous strata north of the Cape, and Livingstone and Thornton discovered coal in sandstone, with fossil plants, like those of our old coal of Europe and America, yet both these mesozoic and palaeozoic remains are terrestrial, and are not associated with marine limestones, indicative of those oscillations of the land which are so common in other countries.
When the more massive rise of land came at the end of the Cretaceous, the temperature would fall over larger areas, and connecting ridges would be established between one area and another. The Mesozoic plants and animals would succumb to this advancing cold.
They divide the eras into four, viz.: 1, Proterozoic; 2, Paleozoic; 3, Mesozoic; 4, Cenozoic. All these "zoics" have to do with life. Proterozoic means before life, and signifies the rocks that contain no fossils indicative of life; Paleozoic signifies the most ancient forms of life; Mesozoic signifies "middle life" or those between the most ancient and the Cenozoic, or recent forms of life.
This stone-embedded relic of the moth that sucked the juices of the plants of the Mesozoic world, incalculable ages before the time even of the gigantic mammals, is preserved in the Teyler Museum at Haarlem. When the new era of the Eocene period developed modern forms of plants, their rapid growth was accompanied by a great increase in the number of insects.
The colossal monsters and the formidable dragons go the way of all primitive life, and a ragged regiment of crocodiles, turtles, and serpents in the tropics, with a swarm of smaller creatures in the fringes of the warm zone, is all that remains, by the Tertiary Era, of the world-conquering army of the Mesozoic reptiles. They had appeared, as we said, in the Permian period.
Palæontology makes it possible to trace the origin and development of many of the different branches that grew out of the mammalian limb from different places and at different times during the Mesozoic and the following age, called the Cenozoic, or age of recent animals.
Skates and rays of a more or less modern type, and ancestral gar-pikes and sturgeons, enter the arena. Their superiority in organisation soon makes itself felt, and they enter upon the rapid evolution which will, by the next period, give them the first place in the fish world. Over the whole Mesozoic world, therefore, we find advance and the promise of greater advance.
Monotis. Plicatula. Pachyrisma. Thecidium. Cassian beds, drawn up first on the joint authority of M. Suess and the late Dr. Woodward, and since corrected by Messrs. Etheridge and Tate, shows how many connecting links between the fauna of primary and secondary Palaeozoic and Mesozoic rocks are supplied by the St. Cassian and Hallstadt beds.
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