76 ANIMAL LIFE PAST AND PRESENT. 



structure of their bony skeleton with mammals. Now, 

 if the reader will take the trouble to pay a visit to 

 the gallery of extinct reptiles in the Natural History 

 Museum at South Kensington, he will see displayed 

 at the west end the entire skeleton of an enormous 

 creature from South Africa known as the Pariasaur. 

 This skeleton shows that its owner occupied a kind of 

 half-way position between the Primitive Salamanders 

 and the Anomodont Eeptiles, so that it is somewhat 

 difficult to say to which group it should be referred, 

 it being not even known whether it had one or two 

 occipital condyles. This and other equally remarkable 

 fossil types render it, however, perfectly evident that 

 the Anomodont Keptiles have been directly derived 

 from the group forming the subject of this chapter; 

 and there is a very strong presumption that we shall 

 eventually be able to trace the origin of mammals to 

 creatures more or less intermediate between those two 

 groups; the Mammalian stock having probably branched 

 off before the two occipital condyles of the Amphibian 

 had merged into the single one of the Eeptile. We 

 may thus look with great veneration on the Primeval 

 Salamanders, as the probable representatives of the 

 ancestral stock of a large portion of the higher verte- 

 brates of the present day. 



