the balance of nature. The harmless and unoffending snake which feeds 
on troublesome insects and rodents is frequently a victim of ignorance 
and unreasoning fear. 
Reptiles provide excellent leathers for fancy luggage and shoes. Turtle 
soup and terrapin stew have long been acknowledged delicacies, and in 
recent years rattlesnake meat has been making a bid for popular approval. 
Jewelers and furniture inlayers use the shell of the hawksbill turtle 
for its decorative quality. 
Primitive tribes still use reptiles in preparing charms, love potions, 
medicines and musical instruments, as well as for food. Salted crocodile 
tails, turtle eggs, fried lizard bones, and snake hearts are alleged to stimu¬ 
late the love instinct. 
Reptiles occupy an evolutionary position between the original inhabi¬ 
tants of the sea and those of the land and air. They might be said to be 
the children of the fishes and amphibians and the parents of the birds and 
mammals. 
The genealogy of the modern reptiles goes back for more than one 
hundred and fifty million years to Carboniferous times, when they appear 
to have evolved from certain amphibians. In the Permian period the reptile 
class branched out into nearly twenty orders. One of these included the 
forerunners of mammals and another the forerunners of birds. Except for 
the four living orders of reptiles which are treated in this volume, the rest 
are extinct and are known only from fossilized remains. 
Reptiles probably originated in the waters of the Paleozoic era when 
strange armored fishes were the dominant form of vertebrate life. Probably 
a group of fishlike amphibians, faced with extermination by drying pools 
and streams, crawled overland to reach other waters and so for the first 
time established life on land. When, through long evolutionary processes, 
some of these ancient amphibians completely freed themselves from the 
water, permanent land dwellers appeared. 
In the long course of time the primitive reptiles, descendants of the 
amphibians, gave rise to a great number of creatures which dominated 
land, sea and sky for about one hundred million years. This period, the 
Mesozoic, is also known as the Age of Reptiles. 
Some reptiles, such as the birdlike Ornithosuchus, became swift-run¬ 
ning, bipedal animals. Others, the Geosaurus, ancestor of our modern 
16 
