of the calamites of the age just passed. Cycads were so common 
in the lowlands near the swamps as to give the era its name ‘ ‘Age 
of Cycads”. To-day their fossil remains are widely distributed 
over the earth — in Greenland, the United States, Mexico, northern 
Asia and other regions, now far too cold for them, for their living 
representatives are mainly found in either the tropics or sub- 
tropics. The hills were covered with dense forests of conifers, 
the relatives of our present-day pines, cypresses and araucarias 
(Norfolk Island pines). These early Mesozoic landscapes, though 
luxuriant, were still gloomy, without the cheery song of bird or 
the bright colors of flowers. The fern forests of New Zealand are 
said to give the best modern picture of the plant life of this 
period. The beautiful agatized forest of Arizona (Chalcedony 
Park), sixty square miles or so in area, is one vast cemetery of 
their remains. Where once, ages ago, probably existed a beauti- 
ful and flourishing vegetation, now is nought but desolate desert, 
where even the adaptive flowering plant has a hard time to pre- 
serve its existence. 
As the Mesozoic era progressed toward its noon, cycads be- 
came even more diversified in form and more abundant. To-day, 
the paleobotanist Scott estimates the ratio of cycads to other 
vascularplants as about one per thousand, while in the Mesozoic 
era, the ratio was about one in three. Their distribution was 
world wflde.cycad fossils being especially common in New Jersey, 
England, Maryland, northern Mexico and the Black Hills area of 
South Dakota and Wyoming. In England, the miners called them 
“crows’-nests”, while in the West our ranchmen refer to them as 
‘‘petrified cactus”. The latter region is probably the richest 
cycad cemetery in the world, over onethousand trunks belonging 
to twenty-nine or more species having been unearthed or picked 
up there. Most of these belong to a peculiar group known as 
Bennettitales, forms with “flowers” somew'hat resembling mag- 
nolia blossoms. This remarkable similarity has led several in- 
vestigators to think they might be the primitive ancestors of our 
flowering plants. Other investigators, however, equally prom- 
inent and authoritative, believe plants related to our pines and 
spruces to have been the more likely progenitors. 
In the main, the middle Mesozoic flora was a continuation 
from that of the earlier part of the era, the chief difference being 
in the greater abundance of characteristic Mesozoic plants, such 
as ginkgos, cycads and forms of horsetails, conifers and ferns. 
Northern Europe was covered with tree ferns, such as now grow 
in much warmer regions. In the extreme north (Spitzbergen ), tree 
trunks have been found showing annual rings, indicating thebe- 
ginning of seasons— the coming of winter and summer. Over the 
rest of the earth, however, the evidence points toward the exist- 
ence still of a warm, moist, sub-tropical climate. 
And thus we come to the latter half of the Mesozoic, that part 
of the era in w’hich occurred an event of more profound importance 
to the world, as seen through man’s eyes, than either the publica- 
tion of “Darwin’s Origin of Species”, the French Revolution, or 
the discovery of America For, in this part of the era, we first 
find flowering plants imbedded in the rocks. From whence they 
came and w f hat were their ancestors is still largeh mystery. Cur- 
iously their most ancient remains have been found only in a few 
areas in the northern hemisphere, and from this one may infer 
that here thev originated, later migrating as successful settlers 
to every nook and corner of the world, excepting the oceans. 
These early flowering plants appear to have been largely trees 
and shrubs, among w’hieh were sassafras, poplar, fig trees, tulip 
trees and others. Of course, herbaceous forms may have existed 
5 
