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At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the passing avalanche music very familiar to his ear, for he had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day is far, yes for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and were probably afraid of him; and before primeval man himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed here, still some eons earlier.
"After all these explorations," repeated Godfrey to himself, "there can be no doubt that Phina Island has no dangerous animals, neither wild beasts, snakes, nor saurians! I have not caught sight of one! Assuredly if there had been any, the report of the gun would have woke them up! It is fortunate, indeed.
Fortunately they did so, for while they were sitting round the fire cooking their game, a dozen crocodiles crept out of the water and came towards them. The whole party, starting to their feet, shouted and shrieked, but not until Tom and Desmond had fired down the throats of a couple of the saurians did the rest turn tail, when, plunging into the water, they disappeared beneath the surface.
And he jumped from his saddle, slipping his arm through the bridle. "I am a runaway. What do you think of the Fugitive Slave Bill?" "I approve of returning property to its owners." "The sea must have been God's temple first, instead of the groves." "I believe the Saurians were an Orthodox tribe." "Did you stop yonder to ponder the sea?" "I was pondering 'Lemorne vs. Huell."
It has the head of a lizard, the snout of a dolphin, the teeth of an alligator, enormous eyes, whose membrane is strengthened by a bony frame, the vertebrae of fishes, sternum and shoulder-bones like those of the lizard, and the fins of a whale. Bayle calls it the whale of the saurians. Another may have been the Cheirotherium.
Together the girls raised their voices in a shout that must have carried far. They wailed, but there was no response. Then they called again, with like result. The outdoor girls looked anxiously at one another. The alligators seemed disposed to maintain their position indefinitely, and the neck of land was so narrow that the saurians occupied the entire width of it.
the first sentence smote him "Paleontologically the periods are characterized by absence of the large marine saurians, Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs " "eh?" gasped Barton. "Why, of course!" called Edgarton, a bit impatiently, from the window. Laboriously Barton went back and reread the phrase to himself. "Oh oh, yes," he conceded lamely. "Paleontologically," he began all over again.
Then, by slow degrees, the mountains of Brazil, with their mines of glittering gems, appeared above the surface of the waters, amid which huge reptile-like whales, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs buffeted the billows, and vast saurians, lizards, and alligators, rivalling the elephant in bulk, and twice his length such as the megalosaurus, the iguanodon, and teleosaurus crawled along the slimy shores; while giant birds, with wide-spreading feet, stalked across the newly-formed plains, or flew shrieking, with wings of prodigious expanse skimming the glittering sea, the lords paramount of this lower world.
Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an assemblage of species which could very favourably compete with the whole lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right-whale could easily give points to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.
The great saurians were thus succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great mammals are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least, by the human species. Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world, so far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary record of the geological remains.
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