258 ROY L. MOODIE. 



ferocious disposition. They were well fitted for such a life armed 

 as they were, in some cases, with long, strong teeth and hard 

 dermal plates and scales. There is an abundance of evidence to 

 their carnivorous habits in the coprolites preserved with their 

 remains. As some of the forms of the Carboniferous may have 

 reached a length of some ten to twelve feet they would be fero- 

 cious creatures to attack in comparison to the modern degenerate 

 forms. The suggestion as to the evolution and ancestry of at 

 least one group of the modern Amphibia will be given elsewhere 

 but the rocks have not yielded, as yet, a great amount of infor- 

 mation which might serve to connect the old and recent forms. 

 The earliest geological evidence of Amphibia are the foot- 

 tracks described by Lea in 1849, and subsequently made more 

 fully known by Marsh, from the Catskill Formation, Upper 

 Devonian, of Pennsylvania. The next evidence is that of abun- 

 dant remains of amphibians from the Allegheny series of the 

 Pennsylvanian in North America and in probably equivalent 

 strata in Europe. Abundant remains are known, also, from the 

 Permian of North America and Europe. Fritsch and Credner, 

 especially, have described abundant faunae from the Permian 

 rocks of Bohemia and Saxony and Cope has done the same for 

 the Permian beds in North America. In the Triassic the majority 

 of the Amphibia are the highly specialized stereospondylus laby- 

 rinthodonts, although a few smaller and more primitive forms are 

 known. The next evidence of Amphibia is the discovery by 

 Dollo of a complete skeleton of a perennibranchiate salamandrine 

 form from the Wealden of Bernissart. 1 From Hylceobatrachus'vn the 

 Wealden to the forms described by Cope from the Laramie Cre- 

 taceous of Montana our knowledge of the Amphibia is a blank. 

 The forms must have existed somewhere but their remains have 

 not yet been discovered. Marsh, it is true, gave a name to some 

 fragments from the Lower Cretaceous of Wyoming but these he 

 never figured and never described and so far as our knowledge 

 of the form goes the name Eobatrachus agilis Marsh may be con- 

 sidered as a mere nomen nudum. In the Eocene rocks, remains 

 of Amphibia are fairly abundant but they represent types which 

 compare with the modern forms in structure and in no way 



1 Dollo, 1884, Bull. Mus. Roy. Hist. Nat. de Belg., III., p. 85. 



