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Updated: May 23, 2025
We know that the dry land of the Trias absolutely teemed with reptiles of all groups except Pterodactyles, Snakes, and perhaps Tortoises; there is every probability that true Birds existed, and Mammalia certainly did. Of the inhabitants of the Permian dry land, on the contrary, all that have left a record are a few lizards.
Terrestrial reptiles have been found in Permian rocks only in three localities; in some spots of France, and recently of England, and over a more extensive area in Germany. Who can suppose that the few fossils yet found in these regions give any sufficient representation of the Permian fauna?
New Zealand seems to have been cut off from the southern continent at the close of the Permian or beginning of the Triassic, and so preserved for us that very interesting relic of Permian life. From some primitive level of this group, it is generally believed, the great Deinosaurs arose.
With the close of the Permian the world of animal and vegetable life had so changed that the line is drawn here which marks the end of the old order and the beginning of the new and separates the Paleozoic from the succeeding era, the Mesozoic, the Middle Age of geological history.
It was only towards its close that some of them came to live on land. The number increases considerably in the Carboniferous and Permian deposits. We find many species both of the articulate and the vertebrate stem that lived on land and breathed the atmosphere; their aquatic ancestors of the Silurian period only breathed water.
It by no means occupies a central position in the chronicle of life from the point of view of time or antiquity, just as the Middle Ages of Europe are by no means the centre of the chronicle of mankind, but its types of animals and plants are singularly transitional between the extinct ancient and the actual modern types. Life has been lifted to a higher level by the Permian revolution.
The phrase, however, the Age of Reptiles, is a fitting and true description of the greater part of the Mesozoic Era, which lies, like a fertile valley, between the Permian and the Chalk upheavals.
It is mainly these later formations the Permian, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Eocene, that give the prevailing features to the South-western landscape that so astonish Eastern eyes.
The Permian fauna- flora of Australia, India, South Africa, and the southern part of South America are so similar that the inference is a reasonable one that these widely separated regions were then connected together, probably as extensions of a great antarctic continent.
Thus it is certain that a comparatively highly organised vertebrate type, such as that of the Labyrinthodonts, is capable of persisting, with no considerable change, through the period represented by the vast deposits which constitute the Carboniferous, the Permian, and the Triassic formations.
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