Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/235

Rh Europe and appeared in the Senonian, and finally became extinct there in the Mæstrichtian. They also have been reported from South America in the Purus of the Amazon, corresponding to the Mæstrichtian times. Professor Marsh's Baptosaurus appears to be the last of the American forms, found in the Upper Green Sand of New Jersey and the Niobrara of Kansas.

In this connection it is interesting to note the views of certain scientific men of the times in which these gigantic sea serpents existed.

The views of Prof. Frank C. Baker, curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, follow: "At the time the great sea lizards lived, North America was shaped something like the following: It



included all of northeastern Canada and Nova Scotia; the shore line was the same as at present as far as New York, where it was deflected to the southwest and went through the western part of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, and then went directly across the middle of Alabama, north again to the mouth of the Ohio River where it meets the Mississippi River, then north into Iowa, and finally north and northwest across the United States and British America. Herein existed a great inland sea in which the sea lizards lived. The past history of the world tells us that thousands of animals of gigantic size lived in the ancient seas. In old Jurassic and Cretaceous times we had such queer combinations as Ichthyosaurus (or fish lizard) and Plesiosaurus. Not only were reptiles found in the water; they flew about in air. The latter were represented by the Rhamphorynchus, a birdlike reptile which had wings like a bat, teeth like an alligator, and the tail of a lizard. In the Connecticut Valley we find the footprints of huge reptiles in the red sandstones whose feet measured from those of a few inches in length to the footprints of the gigantic Otozoum, which measured twenty-two inches in length, having a step of some five feet."