. Falling in love [microform] : with other essays on more exact branches of science. Science; Science. i U n 104 A FOSSIL CONTINENT this is the plain story of that marvellous discovery of a • missing link' in our own pedigree. In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ccratodi. (I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally concluded that the crea
. Falling in love [microform] : with other essays on more exact branches of science. Science; Science. i U n 104 A FOSSIL CONTINENT this is the plain story of that marvellous discovery of a • missing link' in our own pedigree. In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ccratodi. (I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally concluded that the creatire to which they belonged had died out also, and was long since numbered with the dodo nd the mastodon. The idea that a Cera- todus could still be living, far less that it formed an impor- tant link in the development of all the higher animals, could never for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a palaeolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific ai-oll, or to discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircled summit of Eorai- ma, as to unearth a real Uve Oeratodus from a modern estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Kreflft took away the breath of scientific Europe by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimming about as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintest consciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland at the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination, however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting Unk of primary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest air-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it browses on myrtle leaves and gr
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