Geology . life, set tempting morsels before the voracious reptiles, on the onehand, while on the other, the reduction of the land area and the re-striction of their feeding-grounds, intensified by their own multipli-cation, forced a resort to the sea. The sauropterygians seem to have been the leaders in this move-ment and to have become almost at once lords of the sea, and to havepreyed upon the previous rulers, the fishes. The nothosaurs werethe earlier and more primitive type of the Fauropterygians and reachedtheir climax and closed their career within the period; but true plesio-saurs were
Geology . life, set tempting morsels before the voracious reptiles, on the onehand, while on the other, the reduction of the land area and the re-striction of their feeding-grounds, intensified by their own multipli-cation, forced a resort to the sea. The sauropterygians seem to have been the leaders in this move-ment and to have become almost at once lords of the sea, and to havepreyed upon the previous rulers, the fishes. The nothosaurs werethe earlier and more primitive type of the Fauropterygians and reachedtheir climax and closed their career within the period; but true plesio-saurs were present. The accompanying restoration of the skeleton ofLariosaarns, a genus confined to the Trias, illustrates by its well- 46 Gl OLOGY. developed limbs how certainly it had been a land form. In later forms,the limbs were modified into paddles, and all adaptation to locomotionon land was lost, The ancestral affinities of the order are with theanomodonts. The eighteen Triassic genera that have already been.
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublishe, booksubjectgeology
