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But, in spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone. The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the bamboo portières he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should.
"Well, at any rate," said Melick, gravely, "this athaleb solves the difficult question as to how the Troglodytes emigrated to the South Pole." "How?" asked the doctor. "Why, they must have gone there on athalebs! Your friends the pterodactyls probably lingered longest among the Troglodytes, who, seeing that they were rapidly dying out, concluded to depart to another and a better world.
'Humph, it said, sniffing a little contemptuously, yet at the same time affectionately, 'it's not so dusty. The Psammead seemed to pick up very easily the kind of things that people said nowadays. For a creature that had in its time associated with Megatheriums and Pterodactyls, its quickness was really wonderful.
Far back before Jurassic times, millions of years ago, before the coming of bony fishes, when the only mammals were tiny nameless creatures, hardly larger than mice; when the great Altantosaurus dinosaurs browsed on the quaint herbage, and Pterodactyls those ravenous bat-winged dragons of the air hovered above the surface of the earth, in this epoch we can imagine a pair of long-tailed, half-winged creatures which skimmed from tree to tree, perhaps giving an occasional flop the beginning of the marvellous flight motions.
I almost believe he could make a Johnny Reb like codfish, and that night we had a delicious supper and all the time listening to a learned discourse about prehistoric things. I enjoyed the meal and I enjoyed the talk, but I could not sleep peacefully for being chased in my dreams by pterodactyls, dinosaurs, and iguanodons, besides a great many horrible creatures whose names I have forgotten.
Since that thick bed of rock-salt was first precipitated upon the dry floor of some old evaporated inland sea, the greater part of the geological history known to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through incalculable ages. The fish-like saurians and flying pterodactyls of the secondary period have come into existence and gone out of it gracefully again.
Why do they just vanish?" "Autre temps autres moeurs," said the creature. "Is that the Ninevite language?" asked Anthea, who had learned no foreign language at school except French. "What I mean is," the Psammead went on, "that in the old days people wished for good solid everyday gifts, Mammoths and Pterodactyls and things, and those could be turned into stone as easy as not.
I had one strange experience as I came from this second visit which had involved my being away for a night from my companions. I was returning along the well-remembered route, and had reached a spot within a mile or so of the marsh of the pterodactyls, when I saw an extraordinary object approaching me.
One beauty of this theory is that it cannot possibly be disproved; another is that it satisfies all the requirements of the case; a third is that it accounts for the disappearance of the pterodactyls in our world, and their appearance at the South Pole; and there are forty or fifty other facts, all included in this theory, which I have not time just now to enumerate, but will try to do so after we have finished reading the manuscript.
What are Mega-what's-its-names and Ptero-what-do-you-call-thems? And does anyone have them for breakfast?" "Why, almost everyone had Pterodactyl for breakfast in my time! Pterodactyls were something like crocodiles and something like birds I believe they were very good grilled.
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