Imagine the extinct animals of
the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a
tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and
astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 'swam
into their ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size and
shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting quietly in our
midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 'dragons of the prime'
immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the true
enthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel
and a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he had
suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of
lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And this is the plain story of
that marvellous discovery of a 'missing link' in our own pedigree.
In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in
abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ceratodi.
(I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth
reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last
slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally
concluded that the creature to which they belonged had died out also,
and was long since numbered with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea
that a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed an
important link in the development of all the higher animals, could never
for a moment have occurred to anybody.
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