Anhnals Before Man 



buried immediately after death. If we imagine 

 a host of jellyfish resting on the shallows of 

 some quiet little Cambrian bay, and that into 

 this poured a river suddenly made turbid with 

 the mud created by some local inland rain, 

 it will give us some hint as to how their 

 preservation might take place. 



The sea to-day swarms with jellyfish, or 

 Medusae, especially in warm latitudes, and so it 

 must have done in past ages; that "fossil jelly- 

 fish " should be found only in one or two 

 favored localities shows how rarely just the 

 right conditions for their preservation occurred. 



Insects — that is, the imprints of insects — 

 have been found by the thousand in the soft, 

 fine-grained shale of Florissant, Colo.; and 

 many others, including such familiar forms as 

 cockroaches and dragon-flies, have been taken 

 from that great storehouse of wonderful fos- 

 sils, the lithographic-stone quarries of Solen- 

 hofen, Bavaria. And if traces of such delicate 

 and fragile creatures as these have been thus 

 preserved, it is not surprising to find imprints 

 of feathers and of the tough hides of reptiles, 



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