"Cretaceous" Quotes from Famous Books
... fauna to establish the antiquity of Man in this part of France. The mere volume of the drift at various heights would alone suffice to demonstrate a vast lapse of time during which such heaps of shingle, derived both from the Eocene and the Cretaceous rocks, were thrown down in a succession of river-channels. We observe thousands of rounded and half-rounded flints, and a vast number of angular ones, with rounded pieces of white Chalk of various sizes, testifying to a prodigious amount of mechanical action, accompanying the repeated widening ... — The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... the horse-type is exactly and precisely that which could have been predicted from a knowledge of the principles of evolution. And the knowledge we now possess justifies us completely in the anticipation, that when the still lower Eocene deposits, and those which belong to the Cretaceous epoch, have yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, we shall find, first, a form with four complete toes and a rudiment of the innermost or first digit in front, with probably, a rudiment of the fifth digit in the hind foot;[6] while, in still older ... — Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... of the golden age of the reptiles. At the end of the Jurassic the land begins to rise once more. The warm, shallow seas drain off into the deep oceans, and the moist, swampy lands are dried. The emergence continues throughout the Cretaceous (Chalk) period. Chains of vast mountains rise slowly into the air in many parts of the earth, and a new and comparatively rapid change in the vegetation—comparable to that at the close of the Carboniferous—announces the second great revolution. The ... — The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Coal deposits of more recent age are numerous, but in general they have had less time in which to undergo the processes of condensation and refinement, and hence their general grade is lower. In the western United States there are great quantities of subbituminous coal of Cretaceous age, and of Tertiary lignites which have locally been converted by mountain upbuilding into bituminous and semibituminous coals. Jurassic coals are known in many parts of the world outside of North America, and lignites of Tertiary age are widely ... — The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... the Palaeontographical Society for 1851, I will not here enter on it: I will only remark, that the Lepadidae or Pedunculated Cirripedes are much more ancient, according to our present state of knowledge, than the Balanidae. The former seem to have been at their culminant point during the Cretaceous Period, when many species of Scalpellum and Pollicipes, and a singular new genus, Loricula, existed; Pollicipes is the oldest genus, having been found in the Lower Oolite, and, perhaps, even in the Lias. The fossil species ... — A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin |