Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
Yet we must hesitate before we accept, even on such evidence, so sweeping a conclusion, as that the globe, for ages after it was inhabited by all the great classes of invertebrata, remained wholly untenanted by vertebrate animals. 1818: Lower Oolite: Stonesfield. 1847: Upper Trias: Stuttgart. Art. 1854: Lower Eocene: Woolwich Beds. 1858: Chloritic Series, or Upper Greensand: Cambridge.
Professor Huxley in his late memoirs on the order of reptiles called Dinosaurians, which are largely represented in all the formations, from the Neocomian to the Trias inclusive, has shown that they present in their structure many remarkable affinities to birds.
The bottom is the mountain limestone; and the lid is the new red sandstone, or Trias, as they call it now: but the coal you cannot see. It is stowed inside the box, miles away from here. And what is that in the air? A bridge? Yes that is the famous Suspension Bridge and a beautiful work of art it is. Ay, stare at it, and wonder at it, little man, of course. But is it not wonderful?
Some idea of the variety and importance of the terrestrial vertebrate fauna of the three members of the Trias in Northern Germany may be derived from the fact that in the great monograph by the late Hermann von Meyer on the reptiles of the Trias, the remains of no less than eighty distinct species are described and figured.
In this case, the palaeontologist is called upon suddenly to intercalate about 800 species of Mollusca and Radiata, between the fauna of the Lower Lias and that of the Middle Trias. The period in question was previously believed, even by many a philosophical geologist, to have been comparatively barren of organic types.
Also in the purple marls of Corncockle Muir near Dumfries, very distinct footprints of reptiles occur, originally referred to the Trias, but shown by Mr. Binney in 1856 to be Permian. No bones of the animals which they represent have yet been discovered.
Thus the genus Orthoceras has been for the first time recognised in a Mesozoic deposit, and with it we find associated, for the first time, large Ammonites with foliated lobes, a form never seen before below the Lias; also the Ceratites, a family of Cephalopods never before met with in the Upper Trias, and never before in the same stratum with such lobed Ammonites. Archaeopteryx macrurus, Owen.
For my part, I entertain no sort of doubt that the Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals of the Trias are the direct descendants of Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals which existed in the latter part of the Palaeozoic epoch, but not in any area of the present dry land which has yet been explored by the geologist.
The remains of these animals occur throughout the series of Mesozoic formations, from the Trias to the Chalk, and there are indications of their existence even in the later Palæozoic strata. Most of these reptiles, at present known, are of great size, some having attained a length of forty feet or perhaps more.
He does not pretend to trace an exact historical series from the sea-weed to the fern, or from the fern again to the conifers and cycads, and lastly from those families to the palms and oaks, but he, nevertheless, points out that the cryptogamic forms, especially the acrogens, predominate among the fossils of the primary formations, the Carboniferous especially, while the gymnosperms or coniferous and cycadeous plants abound in all the strata, from the Trias to the Wealden inclusive; and lastly, the more highly developed angiosperms, both monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous, do not become abundant until the Tertiary period.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking