The Story of the Rocks 125 



had yet appeared upon the earth. All Nature was clad iu 

 somber garb of gray and green. The air was moist and mild, 

 with seasons same the year around. Those were indeed the 

 "dog days" of the world. The beating wings of many giant 

 insects filled the air, some of which, resembling our modern 

 dragon flies, having a spread of over two feet. In the swamps 

 the decaying vegetation was laying down the future stores of 

 fuel. 



Succeeding the warm moist climate of the early Carbonif- 

 erous came the ice age of the Permian period with its 

 change to a colder climate throughout the earth. The vast 

 swamps gradually disappeared and in their place the Appa- 

 lachian Mountains, today mere relics of their former selves, 

 reared their vast bulk perhaps some 15,000 or 20,000 feet above 

 the sea. With the adoption of a life on land the amphibian 

 stem branched out, giving rise in one direction to the reptiles, 

 in another to the modern amphibians, while yet another line 

 led to the mammals. The earliest reptiles appeared in the 

 Pennsylvanian or upper Carboniferous period, but not until 

 the Mesozoic, did they attain a position of dominance. 



Tn 1802 a Connecticut farmer named Moody ploughed up 

 some pieces of rock bearing some small imprints, which became 

 popularly known as the tracks of Noah's raven. Later on 

 these tracks came to the attention of Doctor James Deane and 

 Professor Hitchcock of Amherst College, who published exten- 

 sive descriptions of them. The tracks were made mostly by 

 three-toed beasts and were at first thought to be those of 

 birds. But occasionally, similar tracks of four- or five-toed 

 animals were found, and they were later shown to be those 

 of dinosaurs, extinct reptiles, which at one time thronged the 

 earth. These tracks appear to have been made in a long 

 narrow estuary of the sea where we may picture to ourselves 

 these creatures roaming over the mud flats left bare by the 

 receding water, and leaving their impression on the mud to 

 be hardened by the heat of the sun and preserved throughout 

 the ages as a record of the life which was. The tracks of 

 some 150 species of various animals (not alone dinosaurs) 

 have been recorded by Professor Hitchcock from this old 

 estuary, one slab alone in Amherst College Museum showing 

 forty-eight tracks -of one species of dinosaur, and six of 

 another species. Strange to say but few remains of the 

 makers of these tracks have been found. It is possible that 

 most of them have been washed out to sea and destroyed, only 

 those few left upon the shores being preserved. 



But the happiest hunting ground of the dinosaurs was not 

 the shores of the Atlantic but the borders of the lakes and 

 rivers which occupied the present Rocky Mountain-Great 



