Like the Deinosaurs and Pterosaurs, the order
was doomed to be entirely extinguished after a brief supremacy in
its environment.
From this short and summary catalogue the reader will be able to
form some conception of the living inhabitants of the Mesozoic
world. It is assuredly the Age of Reptiles. Worms, snails, and
spiders were, we may assume, abundant enough, and a great variety
of insects flitted from tree to tree or sheltered in the fern
brakes. But the characteristic life, in water and on land, was
the vast and diversified family of the reptiles. In the western
and the eastern continent, and along the narrowing bridge that
still united them, in the northern hemisphere and the southern,
and along every ridge of land that connected them, these sluggish
but formidable monsters filled the stage. Every conceivable
device in the way of arms and armour, brute strength and means of
escape, seemed to be adopted in their development, as if they
were the final and indestructible outcome of the life-principle.
And within a single geological period the overwhelming majority
of them, especially the larger and more formidable of them, were
ruthlessly slain, leaving not a single descendant on the earth.
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