AGE OF REPTILES. 



239 



were reptiles, and among them the monstrous Saurians, 

 introduced, but also birds and mammals. The mammals 

 were not, however, in great abundance, and were of the 

 lower orders, the marsupial, which at the present day 

 are so common in Australia. The fishes were all ganoids 

 and placoids, as in the Palaeozoic ages, but there was an 

 approach in their tails to the bilobed character of the 

 present day ( 302), and some were wholly of this mod- 

 ern fashion. Of the Mollusks, a family called 

 Ammonites, which figured largely in the two 

 ^ other periods of the 



^k Reptilian age, now ap- 

 8^ peared. " One species, 

 the Ammonites nodo- 

 sus, is represented in 

 Fig. 137. Among the 

 radiated animals of this 

 period was a crinoid of 

 singular beauty, called 

 the Lily Encrinite, Fig. 138. 



345. Reptiles. Lizards, Saurians, Batra- 

 chians, many of them gigantic in size, were Fi s- 13S - 

 abundant, though not so abundant, and strange, and 

 monstrous as they were in the following period, the mid- 

 dle one of the age of Reptiles. One of the most remark- 

 able of these animals was the Labyrinthoclon, pictured in 

 Fig. 139 (p. 240). Though having a head of three or four 

 feet in length, and teeth three inches long, and being 

 about the size of an ox, with his" long hind legs, he was 

 very much like a frog. All of his skeleton has never 

 been discovered, but from his skull and some other bones 

 Professor Owen, by his knowledge of the adaptation of 

 bones to each other, like Cuvier, has reconstructed in his 

 mind the whole frame of the animal, and the result is the 

 singular form which you have in the figure. The tracks 

 which you see in the figure have been observed alone, in 

 Triassic rocks, and have, until recently, been supposed 



Fig. 137. 



