870 Marvels of the Universe 
THE GEOSAUR. 
A restoration of a marine Crocodile of the Jurassic period. It shows a transition stage in the evolution of the race, for 
here the limbs are converted into paddles and there are no bony plates on the back. 
and disappearing. In these we view the Portland beds, so valuable economically, and interesting 
by reason of their trees of the cycad type. Then, as we reach the Chalk Age, we see the inrush of 
trees of the modern type of dicotyledons, living, indeed, within the Arctic Circle, where for half the 
year all Nature is wrapped in darkness. Very evidently it was not so in those days. Then the 
Chalk, which for very many centuries had been forming under the sea by the agency of minute 
foraminifers, was uplifted into dry land, and was also folded into wave-like folds, only again, after 
great denudation, to be let down into the sea once more, to receive upon it the London Clay and 
other tertiaries which are now found in the London, the Hampshire, and the Paris Basins. 
But a great change once again came upon the scene. The Ice Age had arrived. First covered 
with glaciers, and finally, by their union, by one great ice-sheet, the land sank beneath its burden, 
until Britain was lost to view, save a few islands where the peaks of her former mountains showed 
above the sea. Then after repeated oscillations, she finally rose “ from out the azure main,” and 
many of her beaches have since been raised high and dry above the present sea. 
The history of the earth’s crust is one of frequent movement. Uprisings and subsidences are 
still in evidence in many parts of the world now. Volcanic action is far from quenched. What has 
been formerly may be again. Hills and mountains are born but to disappear. But one constant 
factor alone remains, and that is the shifting, ever-restless sea. 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE CROCODILE 
BY W. P. PYCRAFT, F.Z.S., ETC. 
CROCODILES seem remote enough from the daily lives of most of us who are dwellers in the British 
Islands, but time was when these creatures swarmed in the rivers which then traversed this land 
of ours. This we know, because their remains have been found in the London Clay near 
Sheerness, in Hampshire in the Upper Eocene sands of Hordle Cliff, in the Middle Eocene 
of Bracklesham Bay, Sussex, the Purbeck stone of Swanage, the Stonesfield slate near Oxford, 
and the Upper Lias of Whitby. These remains tell us, among other things, that in those far-off 
days, stretching back millions of years, the climate must have been sub-tropical. They tell us, 
too, another story no less interesting ; and this concerns the evolution of the modern Crocodiles, 
Alligators and Gavials, which live, happily for us, in regions far remote. 
The tale of the coming of the Crocodile would take long to tell if we attempted to begin at the 
