In this brief summary of the past life of reptiles and birds in America, I have endeavored to exclude doubtful forms, and those very imperfectly known, preferring to present the conclusions reached by careful study, incomplete though they be, rather than weary you with a descriptive catalogue of all the fossils to which names have been applied. Even this condensed review can hardly fail to give you some conception of the wealth of our continent in the extinct forms of these groups, and thus to suggest what its actual life must have been.
Although the Trias offers at present the first unquestioned evidence of true reptiles, we certainly should not be justified in supposing for a moment that older forms did not exist. So too in considering the different groups of reptiles, which seem to make their first appearance at certain horizons, flourish for a time, and then decline, or disappear, every day brings evidence to show that they are but fragments of the unraveled strands which converge in the past to form the mystic cord uniting all life. If the attempt is made to follow back any single thread, and thus trace the lineage of a group, We are met by difficulties which the science of to-day can only partially remove. And yet the anatomist constantly sees in the fragments which he studies hints of relationship which are to him sure prophecies of future discoveries.
The genealogy of the Chelonia is at present unknown, and our American extinct forms, so far as we now have them, throw little light on their ancestry. This is essentially true, also, of our Plesiosauria, Lacertilia, and Ophidia, although suggestive facts are not wanting to indicate possible lines of descent. With the Crocodilia, however, the case seems to be different, and Huxley has clearly pointed out the path for investigation. It is probable that material already exists in our museums for tracing the group through several important steps in its development. We have already seen that the modern procœlian type of this order goes back only to the Upper Cretaceous, while the Belodonts, of our Triassic rocks, with their biconcave vertebrae, are the oldest known Crocodilians. Our Jurassic, unfortunately, throws but little light on the intermediate forms, but we know that the line was continued, as it was in the Old World through Teleosaurus. The beds of the Rocky Mountain Wealden[1] have just furnished us with a genuine "missing link," a saurian (Diplosaurus) with essentially the skull and teeth of a modern crocodile, and the vertebræ of its predecessor from the Trias. This peculiar reptile clearly represents an important stage in the progressive series, and evidently one soon after the separation of the crocodile branch from the main stem. The modern Gavial type appears to have been developed about the same time, as the form was well established in the Upper Cretaceous genus, Thoracosaurus. The Teleosaurian group, with biconcave vertebræ,
- ↑ See note on page 520, also section.
