"Mesozoic" Quotes from Famous Books
... tertiaries, the places of existing animals and plants are taken by other forms, as numerous and diversified as those which live now in the same localities, but more or less different from them; in the mesozoic rocks, these are replaced by others yet more divergent from modern types; and in the palaeozoic formations the contrast is still more marked. Thus the circumstantial evidence absolutely negatives the conception of the eternity of the present condition of things. We can say with certainty that ... — American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... separated—and, looking at the matter geographically, I see no reason to doubt that a boring rod driven from the surface of the mud which forms the floor of the mid-Atlantic would pass through one continuous mass of Globigerina mud, first of modern, then of tertiary, and then of mesozoic date; the "chalks" of different depths and ages being distinguished merely by the different forms of other ... — Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Huxley speaks of a 'verbal fog by which the question at issue may be hidden;' is there no verbal fog in the statement that the aetiology of crayfishes resolves itself into a gradual evolution in the course of the mesozoic and subsequent epochs of the world's history of these animals from a primitive astacomorphous form? Would it be fog or light that would envelop the history of man if we say that the existence of man was explained ... — Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Before man the great and prevalent creatures followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe ... — An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... view, or from any number of such points of view; but a formulation of their motions that will serve as the key to an infinite number of their appearances. Or, consider the picture of the ichthysauria romping in the mesozoic sea, that commonly accompanies a text-book of geology. Any such picture, and all such pictures, with their coloring and their temporal and spacial perspective, are imaginary. No such special and exclusive manifolds can be defined as having been ... — The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... ages of invertebrates, of fishes, and of coal plants, respectively) are together spoken of as representing Paleozoic time. William Smith's system of strata, next above these, once called "secondary," represents Mesozoic time, or the age of reptiles. Still higher, or more recent, are Cuvier and Brongniart's tertiary rocks, representing the age of mammals. Lastly, the most recent formations, dating back, however, to a period far enough from recent in any but a ... — A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... North America the work of mountain-building was, indeed, on the grandest scale. For long ages and through a succession of geological epochs, sedimentation had proceeded so that the accumulations of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times had collected in the geosyncline formed by their own ever increasing weight. The site of the future Laramide range was in late Cretaceous times occupied by some 50,000 feet of sedimentary deposits; but the limit had apparently been attained, and at this time the Laramide range, as well ... — The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... rolling country east of this contained eruptive rocks—a porphyritic disbase, with zeolite, quartz, and agate of Triassic age. With the chapadao of the Parecis plateau we came to a land of sand and clay, dotted with lumps of sandstone and pieces of petrified wood; this, according to Oliveira, is of Mesozoic age, possibly cretaceous and similar to the South African formation. There are geologists who consider it ... — Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Eugereon, an insect with hemipteroid jaws and orthopteroid wings. All these insects must have been exopterygote in their life-history, if we may trust the indications of affinity furnished by their structure. In the Mesozoic period, however, insects with complete transformations must have been fairly abundant. Rocks of Triassic age have yielded beetles and lacewing-flies, while from among Jurassic fossils specimens have been described ... — The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... tooth-billed and reptile-tailed birds of the secondary epoch, to the wonderfully developed falcons, crows, and swallows of our time. So, the ferns, lycopods, conifers, and monocotyledons of the palaeozoic and mesozoic rocks, have developed into the marvellous wealth of forms of the higher dicotyledons ... — Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace |