But one must remember that during the heyday
of the great saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals. The
place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses, as well as
the place now filled in the great continents by the elephants, the
rhinoceroses, the hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then
filled exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us
all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace
grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had _their_ day in the
secondary period. The forms into which they developed were certainly
every whit as large as any ever seen on the surface of this planet, but
not, as I have already shown, appreciably larger than those of the
biggest cetaceans known to science in our own time.
During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and pterodactyls
were playing such pranks before high heaven as might have made
contemporary angels weep, if they took any notice of saurian morality, a
small race of unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense
shades of the neighbouring forests which was destined at last to oust
the huge reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the
fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole planet. In
the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of
tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the
banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day.
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