Sword-fishes and monstrous sharks lived in the sea. Large turtles
and crocodiles and enormous "sea-serpents" lingered in this last
spell of warmth that Central Europe would experience. A primitive
whale appeared in the seas, and strange large tapir-like
mammals--remote ancestors of our horses and more familiar
beasts--wandered heavily on the land. Gigantic primitive birds,
sometimes ten feet high, waded by the shore. Deposits of the
period at Bournemouth and in the Isle of Wight tell the same
story of a land that bore figs, vines, palms, araucarias, and
aralias, and waters that sheltered turtles and crocodiles. The
Parisian region presented the same features.
In fact, one of the most characteristic traces of the southern
sea which then stretched from England to Africa in the south and
India in the east indicates a warm climate. It will be remembered
that the Cretaceous ocean over Southern Europe had swarmed with
the animalcules whose dead skeletons largely compose our
chalk-beds. In the new southern ocean another branch of these
Thalamophores, the Nummulites, spreads with such portentous
abundance that its shells--sometimes alone, generally with other
material--make beds of solid limestone several thousand feet in
thickness.
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