Greenland and Spitzbergen are
fragments of a continent that then bore a luxuriant growth of
ferns and cycads, and housed large reptiles that could not now
live thousands of miles south of it. England, and a large part of
Europe, was a tranquil blue coral-ocean, the fringes of its
islands girt with reefs such as we find now only three thousand
miles further south, with vast shoals of Ammonites, sometimes of
gigantic size, preying upon its living population or evading its
monstrous sharks; while the sunlit lands were covered with
graceful, palmlike cycads and early yews and pines and cypresses,
and quaint forms of reptiles throve on the warm earth or in the
ample swamps, or rushed on outstretched wings through the purer
air.
It was an evergreen world, a world, apparently, of perpetual
summer. No trace is found until the next period of an alternation
of summer and winter--no trees that shed their leaves annually,
or show annual rings of growth in the wood--and there is little
trace of zones of climate as yet. It is true that the sensitive
Ammonites differ in the northern and the southern latitudes, but,
as Professor Chamberlin says, it is not clear that the difference
points to a diversity of climate.
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