58 WATER REPTILES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT 



the common box tortoise of today, but vastly larger, found in the 

 rocks of the late Miocene or early Pliocene age in western Kansas. 

 And these are the last records of the big tortoises in North America; 

 their descendants are perhaps yet living in the Galapagos Islands. 



The history of the lizards and snakes, the only other reptiles 

 found in the Cenozoic rocks of America, is very brief. A few 

 specimens from the Lower Eocene of Wyoming; a few skinks 

 and amphisbaenas from the Oligocene Bad Lands of South Dakota, 

 and some bones of a python-like snake in the early Eocene of Wyo- 

 ming are about all that we know of the Squamata in the Tertiary. 

 Doubtless snakes and lizards were just as abandunt then as now, 

 though but few were preserved, for they are and always have been 

 distinctly terrestrial animals, that only by accident fell into places 

 where they could be fossilized. 



The author has collected reptile bones from nearly all of the 

 horizons here mentioned and believes that the list is complete. 



