CHORD ATA — VERTEBRATA — AMPHIBIANS 351 



Fig. 150. — Restoration of a landscape by the side of a sluggish creek in Texas and 

 New Mexico during the Upper Pennsylvanian and Lower Permian times. Of the 

 abundant fauna of this period, nearly fifty distinct genera of amphibians and 

 reptiles have been so far recovered. This fauna is of especial interest since it is 

 the oldest known reptihan fauna and the most comprehensive of the older amphib- 

 ian. Only one example of each is here restored. Upon the land are two figures 

 of Er>'ops, — a stegocephalian amphibian, about seven feet long, with a skull 

 nearly two feet long, while other adult amphibia living with it have a skull no larger 

 than a man's thumb nail. The lowlands must have swarmed with these animals 

 and the contemporaneous reptiles. In the water is a theromor ph reptile, Limnos- 

 celis, about seven feet long, with a beak-like skull armed with strong conical 

 teeth. Flying above this is one of the giant "dragon flies,'' Meganeura, some 

 representatives of which had a two-foot spread of wings. The fern-like trees and 

 bushy plants of the foreground are cycadofilicaleans. To the right are wide 

 stretches of the huge scouring rush, Calarnites ; on slightly higher ground to the 

 left are Lepidodendrons (branched) and Sigillarias (unbranched), these latter still 

 being quite as prominent forest constituents as earher in the coal period. 



One must view this single river bank, creek, or shore of an inlet as a single one of 

 many such landscapes, ever varying in detail. Cordaites, which in later Devonian 

 time made the first great forest constituent of which there is record, is still present, 

 though not shown. So, too, there are hidden in the recesses of the forest the fore- 

 runners of the modem coniferous types as well as other forms destined to give rise 

 to the angiosperms. (From Williston, the landscape adapted from Neumayr.) 



