THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS 



The lizards more than made up for the scarcity 

 of snakes. They were abundant and of many 

 different kinds. None of them was poisonous. 

 It seemed to me, as I watched them climb bushes 

 and trees, hop along the ground, or skip over the 

 surface of the lake, that I might be living in the 

 Age of Reptiles, when they were lords of the world 

 and there was neither man nor any of the hairy, 

 four-footed animals to be found. But I had to 

 remember that in those old days some of them 

 were so huge that I should have scuttled away 

 from them as swiftly as their small very-great- 

 grandchildren slipped away from me now. 



The ancestors of these very lizards were living 

 back in the years when the great coalbeds were 

 being laid down in hot forest swamps, and many 

 geologists think this happened more than five 

 hundred milHon years ago (Fig. 53). Coal 

 miners dig up their bones now with the coal, and 

 in the earth layer just above the coal they find 

 the bones and footprints of huge lizard-like 

 animals, a hundred feet long and weighing several 

 tons. Sometimes they were large and sometimes 

 they were small, but always there were lizards 

 to be found in this warm region. When the 

 land sank and the sea came in they moved back. 



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