182 The Wonders of the Permian 



tons covering a space six or seven feet wide, ten 

 or twelve feet long and two feet thick. In this 

 limited interval, according to Dr. S. W. Willis- 

 ton, who has been so fortunate as to study the 

 material secured by Miller were dozens of com- 

 plete skeletons packed like sardines in a box of 

 the wonderful fauna of the Penuan of Texas. 



From a slight observation of the flora of the 

 region into which we had been miraculously 

 transplanted, it had convinced me that I had 

 gone back from the twentieth century some 

 twelve million years to the close of the Carboni- 

 ferous, that great age of Coal Plants, when vast 

 regions packed with the moss and other vegeta- 

 tion had been engulfed in the sea, and after ages 

 converted into coal. 



So, how easily it was for me to realize that one 

 of these lovely moss covered pools, might prove 

 a death-trap to any animal whose spoor lay 

 through this region. It was lucky for me that I 

 still possessed a Marsh pick with its broad duck- 

 billed end, with which I could easily hew my way 

 through the dense but easily felled trees and 

 rushes, that obstructed in jungles of vegetation 

 my progress. I judged that the open spaces I saw 

 in the distance from my lookout in the crown of 

 a tree-fern, must represent ponds or lakes and 

 there, would be by far a better place to study 

 the fauna of this strange region, because I knew 

 from iny own discoveries in the Permian of 

 Texas that many of the vertebrates were Amphi- 



