The Story of Evolution Part 9

The next order of the Deinosaurs is that of the biped vegetarians, the Ornithopods, which gradually became heavily armoured and quadrupedal.

The familiar Iguanodon is the chief representative of this order in Europe. Walking on its three-toed hind limbs, its head would be fourteen or fifteen feet from the ground. The front part of its jaws was toothless and covered with horn. It had, in fact, a kind of beak, and it also approached the primitive bird in the structure of its pelvis and in having five toes on its small front limbs. Some of the Ornithopods, such as the Laosaur, were small (three or four feet in height) and active, but many of the American specimens attained a great size. The Camptosaur, which was closely related to the Iguanodon in structure, was thirty feet from the snout to the end of the tail, and the head probably stood eighteen feet from the ground. One of the last great representatives of the group in America, the Trachodon, about thirty feet in length, had a most extraordinary head. It was about three and a half feet in length, and had no less than 2000 teeth lining the mouth cavity. It is conjectured that it fed on vegetation containing a large proportion of silica.

In the course of the Jura.s.sic, as we saw, a branch of these biped, bird-footed vegetarians developed heavy armour, and returned to the quadrupedal habit. We find them both in Europe and America, and must suppose that the highway across the North Atlantic still existed.

The Stegosaur is one of the most singular and most familiar representatives of the group in the Jura.s.sic. It ran to a length of thirty feet, and had a row of bony plates, from two to three feet in height, standing up vertically along the ridge of its back, while its tail was armed with formidable spikes. The Scleidosaur, an earlier and smaller (twelve-foot) specimen, also had spines and bony plates to protect it. The Polacanthus and Ankylosaur developed a most effective armour-plating over the rear. As we regard their powerful armour, we seem to see the fierce-toothed Theropods springing from the rear upon the poor-mouthed vegetarians. The carnivores selected the vegetarians, and fitted them to survive. Before the end of the Mesozoic, in fact, the Ornithopods became aggressive as well as armoured. The Triceratops had not only an enormous skull with a great ridged collar round the neck, but a sharp beak, a stout horn on the nose, and two large and sharp horns on the top of the head. We will see something later of the development of horns. The skulls of members of the Ceratops family sometimes measured eight feet from the snout to the ridge of the collar.

They were, however, sluggish and stupid monsters, with smaller brains even than the Sauropods.

Such, in broad outline, was the singular and powerful family of the Mesozoic Deinosaurs. Further geological research in all parts of the world will, no doubt, increase our knowledge of them, until we can fully understand them as a great family throwing out special branches to meet the different conditions of the crowded Jura.s.sic age. Even now they afford a most interesting page in the story of evolution, and their total disappearance from the face of the earth in the next geological period will not be unintelligible. We turn from them to the remaining orders of the Jura.s.sic reptiles.

In the popular mind, perhaps, the Ichthyosaur and Plesiosaur are the typical representatives of that extinct race. The two animals, however, belong to very different branches of the reptile world, and are by no means the most formidable of the Mesozoic reptiles. Many orders of the land reptiles sent a branch into the waters in an age which, we saw, was predominantly one of water-surface. The Ichthyosauria ("fish-reptiles") and Thalattosauria ("sea-reptiles") invaded the waters at their first expansion in the later Tria.s.sic. The latter groups soon became extinct, but the former continued for some millions of years, and became remarkably adapted to marine life, like the whale at a later period.

The Ichthyosaur of the Jura.s.sic is a remarkably fish-like animal. Its long tapering frame--sometimes forty feet in length, but generally less than half that length--ends in a dip of the vertebral column and an expansion of the flesh into a strong tail-fin. The terminal bones of the limbs depart more and more from the quadruped type, until at last they are merely rows of circular bony plates embedded in the broad paddle into which the limb has been converted. The head is drawn out, sometimes to a length of five feet, and the long narrow jaws are set with two formidable rows of teeth; one specimen has about two hundred teeth. In some genera the teeth degenerate in the course of time, but this merely indicates a change of diet. One fossilised Ichthyosaur of the weaker-toothed variety has been found with the remains of two hundred Belemnites in its stomach. It is a flash of light on the fierce struggle and carnage which some recent writers have vainly striven to attenuate.

The eyes, again, which may in the larger animals be fifteen inches in diameter, are protected by a circle of radiating bony plates. In fine, the discovery of young developed skeletons inside the adult frames has taught us that the Ichthgosaur had become viviparous, like the mammal.

Cutting its last connection with the land, on which it originated it ceased to lay eggs, and developed the young within its body.

The Ichthyosaur came of the reptile group which we have called the Diapsids. The Plesiosaur seems to belong to the Synapsid branch. In the earlier Mesozoic we find partially aquatic representatives of the line, like the Nothosaur, and in the later Plesiosaur the adaptation to a marine life is complete. The skin has lost its scales, and the front limbs are developed into powerful paddles, sometimes six feet in length.

The neck is drawn out until, in some specimens, it is found to consist of seventy-six vertebrae: the longest neck in the animal world. It is now doubted, however, if the neck was very flexible, and, as the jaws were imperfectly joined, the common picture of the Plesiosaur darting its snake-like neck in all directions to seize its prey is probably wrong. It seems to have lived on small food, and been itself a rich diet to the larger carnivores. We find it in all the seas of the Mesozoic world, varying in length from six to forty feet, but it is one of the sluggish and unwieldy forms that are destined to perish in the coming crisis.

The last, and perhaps the most interesting, of the doomed monsters of the Mesozoic was the Pterosaur, or "flying reptile." It is not surprising that in the fierce struggle which is reflected in the arms and armour of the great reptiles, a branch of the family escaped into the upper region. We have seen that there were leaping reptiles with hollow bones, and although the intermediate forms are missing, there is little doubt that the Pterosaur developed from one or more of these leaping Deinosaurs. As it is at first small, when it appears in the early Jura.s.sic--it is disputed in the late Tria.s.sic--it probably came from a small and agile Deinosaur, hunted by the carnivores, which relied on its leaping powers for escape. A flapperlike broadening of the fore limbs would help to lengthen the leap, and we must suppose that this membrane increased until the animal could sail through the air, like the flying-fish, and eventually sustain its weight in the air. The wing is, of course, not a feathery frame, as in the bird, but a special skin spreading between the fore limb and the side of the body. In the bat this skin is supported by four elongated fingers of the hand, but in the Pterosaur the fifth (or fourth) finger alone--which is enormously elongated and strengthened--forms its outer frame. It is as if, in flying experiments, a man were to have a web of silk stretching from his arm and an extension of his little finger to the side of his body.

From the small early specimens in the early Jura.s.sic the flying reptiles grow larger and larger until the time of their extinction in the stresses of the Chalk upheaval. Small Pterosaurs continue throughout the period, but from these bat-like creatures we rise until we come to such dragons as the American Pteranodon, with a stretch of twenty-two feet between its extended wings and jaws about four feet long. There were long-tailed Pterosaurs (Ramphorhyncus), sometimes with a rudder-like expansion of the end of the tail, and short-tailed Pterosaurs (Pterodactyl), with compact bodies and keeled b.r.e.a.s.t.s, like the bird. In the earlier part of the period they all have the heavy jaws and numerous teeth of the reptile, with four or five well-developed fingers on the front limbs. In the course of time they lose the teeth--an advantage in the distribution of the weight of the body while flying--and develop h.o.r.n.y beaks. In the gradual shaping of the breast-bone and head, also, they ill.u.s.trate the evolution of the bird-form.

But the birds were meantime developing from a quite different stock, and would replace the Pterosaurs at the first change in the environment.

There is ground for thinking that these flying reptiles were warm-blooded like the birds. Their hollow bones seem to point to the effective breathing of a warm-blooded animal, and the great vitality they would need in flying points toward the same conclusion. Their brain, too, approached that of the bird, and was much superior to that of the other reptiles. But they had no warm coats to retain their heat, no clavicle to give strength to the wing machinery, and, especially in the later period, they became very weak in the hind limbs (and therefore weak or slow in starting their flight). The coming selection will therefore dismiss them from the scene, with the Deinosaurs and Ammonites, and retain the better organised bird as the lord of the air.

There remain one or two groups of the Mesozoic reptiles which are still represented in nature. The turtle-group (Chelonia) makes its appearance in the Tria.s.sic and thrives in the Jura.s.sic. Its members are extinct and primitive forms of the thick-sh.e.l.led reptiles, but true turtles, both of marine and fresh water, abound before the close of the Mesozoic.

The sea-turtles attain an enormous size. Archelon, one of the primitive types, measured about twelve feet across the sh.e.l.l. Another was thirteen feet long and fifteen feet from one outstretched flipper to the other.

In the Chalk period they form more than a third of the reptile remains in some regions. They are extremely interesting in that they show, to some extent, the evolution of their characteristic sh.e.l.l. In some of the larger specimens the ribs have not yet entirely coalesced.

The Crocodilians also appear in the later Tria.s.sic, abound in the Jura.s.sic, and give way before the later types, the true Crocodiles, in the Cretaceous. They were marine animals with naked skin, a head and neck something like that of the Ichthyosaur, and paddles like those of the Plesiosaur. Their back limbs, however, were not much changed after their adaptation to life in the sea, and it is concluded that they visited the land to lay their eggs. The Teleosaur was a formidable narrow-spouted reptile, somewhat resembling the crocodiles of the Ganges in the external form of the jaws. The modern crocodiles, which replaced this ancient race of sea-crocodiles, have a great advantage over them in the fact that their nostrils open into the mouth in its lower depths.

They can therefore close their teeth on their prey under water and breathe through the nose.

Snakes are not found until the close of the Mesozoic, and do not figure in its characteristic reptile population. We will consider them later.

But there was a large group of reptiles in the later Mesozoic seas which more or less correspond to the legendary idea of a sea-serpent. These Dolichosaurs ("long reptiles") appear at the beginning of the Chalk period, and develop into a group, the Mososaurians, which must have added considerably to the terrors of the sh.o.r.e-waters. Their slender scale-covered bodies were commonly twenty to thirty feet in length. The supreme representative of the order, the Mososaur, of which about forty species are known, was sometimes seventy-five feet long. It had two pairs of paddles--so that the name of sea-serpent is very imperfectly applicable--and four rows of formidable teeth on the roof of its mouth.

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 a.s.suredly the Age of Reptiles. Worms, snails, and spiders were, we may a.s.sume, 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. Let us see what types of animals were thus preferred to them in the next great application of selective processes.

CHAPTER XIII. THE BIRD AND THE MAMMAL

In one of his finest stories, Sur La Pierre Blanche, Anatole France has imagined a group of Roman patricians discussing the future of their Empire. The Christians, who are about to rise to power on their ruin, they dismiss with amiable indifference as one of the little pa.s.sing eccentricities of the religious life of their time. They have not the dimmest prevision, even as the dream of a possibility, that in a century or two the Empire of Rome will lie in the dust, and the cross will tower above all its cities from York to Jerusalem. If we might for a moment endow the animals of the Mesozoic world with AEsopian wisdom, we could imagine some such discussion taking place between a group of Deinosaur patricians. They would reflect with pride on the unshakable empire of the reptiles, and perhaps glance with disdain at two types of animals which hid in the recesses or fled to the hills of the Jura.s.sic world.

And before another era of the earth's story opened, the reptile race would be dethroned, and these hunted and despised and feeble eccentricities of Mesozoic life would become the masters of the globe.

These two types of organisms were the bird and the mammal. Both existed in the Jura.s.sic, and the mammals at least had many representatives in the Tria.s.sic. In other words, they existed, with all their higher organisation, during several million years without attaining power. The mammals remained, during at least 3,000,000 years, a small and obscure caste, immensely overshadowed by the small-brained reptiles. The birds, while making more progress, apparently, than the mammals, were far outnumbered by the flying reptiles until the last part of the Mesozoic.

Then there was another momentous turn of the wheel of fate, and they emerged from their obscurity to a.s.sume the lords.h.i.+p of the globe.

In earlier years, when some serious hesitation was felt by many to accept the new doctrine of evolution, a grave difficulty was found in the circ.u.mstance that new types--not merely new species and new genera, but new orders and even sub-cla.s.ses--appeared in the geological record quite suddenly. Was it not a singular coincidence that in ALL cases the intermediate organisms between one type and another should have wholly escaped preservation? The difficulty was generally due to an imperfect acquaintance with the conditions of the problem. The fossil population of a period is only that fraction of its living population which happened to be buried in a certain kind of deposit under water of a certain depth. We shall read later of insects being preserved in resin (amber), and we have animals (and even bacteria) preserved in trees from the Coal-forests. Generally speaking, however, the earth has buried only a very minute fraction of its land-population. Moreover, only a fraction of the earth's cemeteries have yet been opened. When we further reflect that the new type of organism, when it first appears, is a small and local group, we see what the chances are of our finding specimens of it in a few scattered pages of a very fragmentary record of the earth's life. We shall see that we have discovered only about ten skeletons or fragments of skeletons of the men who lived on the earth before the Neolithic period; a stretch of some hundreds of thousands of years, recorded in the upper strata of the earth.

Whatever serious difficulty there ever was in this scantiness of intermediate types is amply met by the fact that every fresh decade of search in the geological tombs brings some to light. We have seen many instances of this--the seed-bearing ferns and flower-bearing cycads, for example, found in the last decade--and will see others. But one of the most remarkable cases of the kind now claims our attention. The bird was probably evolved in the late Tria.s.sic or early Jura.s.sic. It appears in abundance, divided into several genera, in the Chalk period. Luckily, two bird-skeletons have been found in the intermediate period, the Jura.s.sic, and they are of the intermediate type, between the reptile and the bird, which the theory of evolution would suggest. But for the fortunate accident of these two birds being embedded in an ancient Bavarian mud-layer, which happened to be opened, for commercial purposes, in the second half of the nineteenth century, critics of evolution--if there still were any in the world of science--might be repeating to-day that the transition from the reptile to the bird was unthinkable in theory and unproven in fact.

The features of the Archaeopteryx ("primitive bird") have been described so often, and such excellent pictorial restorations of its appearance may now be seen, that we may deal with it briefly. We have in it a most instructive combination of the characters of the bird and the reptile.

The feathers alone, the imprint of which is excellently preserved in the fine limestone, would indicate its bird nature, but other anatomical distinctions are clearly seen in it. "There is," says Dr. Woodward, "a typical bird's 'merrythought' between the wings, and the hind leg is exactly that of a perching bird." In other words, it has the shoulder-girdle and four-toed foot, as well as the feathers, of a bird.

On the other hand, it has a long tail (instead of a terminal tuft of feathers as in the bird) consisting of twenty-one vertebrae, with the feathers springing in pairs from either side; it has biconcave vertebrae, like the fishes, amphibia, and reptiles; it has teeth in its jaws; and it has three complete fingers, free and clawed, on its front limbs.

As in the living Peripatus, therefore, we have here a very valuable connecting link between two very different types of organisms. It is clear that one of the smaller reptiles--the Archaeopteryx is between a pigeon and a crow in size--of the Tria.s.sic period was the ancestor of the birds. Its most conspicuous distinction was that it developed a coat of feathers. A more important difference between the bird and the reptile is that the heart of the bird is completely divided into four chambers, but, as we saw, this probably occurred also in the other flying reptiles. It may be said to be almost a condition of the greater energy of a flying animal. When the heart has four complete chambers, the carbonised blood from the tissues of the body can be conveyed direct to the lungs for purification, and the aerated blood taken direct to the tissues, without any mingling of the two. In the mud-fish and amphibian, we saw, the heart has two chambers (auricles) above, but one (ventricle) below, in which the pure and impure blood mingle. In the reptiles a part.i.tion begins to form in the lower chamber. In the turtle it is so nearly complete that the venous and the arterial blood are fairly separated; in the crocodile it is quite complete, though the arteries are imperfectly arranged. Thus the four-chambered heart of the bird and mammal is not a sudden and inexplicable development. Its advantage is enormous in a cold climate. The purer supply of blood increases the combustion in the tissues, and the animal maintains its temperature and vitality when the surrounding air falls in temperature. It ceases to be "cold-blooded."

But the bird secures a further advantage, and here it outstrips the flying reptile. The naked skin of the Pterosaur would allow the heat to escape so freely when the atmosphere cooled that a great strain would be laid on its vitality. A man lessens the demand on his vitality in cold regions by wearing clothing. The bird somehow obtained clothing, in the shape of a coat of feathers, and had more vitality to spare for life-purposes in a falling temperature. The reptile is strictly limited to one region, the bird can pa.s.s from region to region as food becomes scarce.

The question of the origin of the feathers can be discussed only from the speculative point of view, as they are fully developed in the Archaeopteryx, and there is no approach toward them in any other living or fossil organism. But a long discussion of the problem has convinced scientific men that the feathers are evolved from the scales of the reptile ancestor. The a.n.a.logy between the shedding of the coat in a snake and the moulting of a bird is not uninstructive. In both cases the outer skin or epidermis is shedding an old growth, to be replaced by a new one. The covering or h.o.r.n.y part of the scale and the feather are alike growths from the epidermis, and the initial stages of the growth have certain a.n.a.logies. But beyond this general conviction that the feather is a development of the scale, we cannot proceed with any confidence. Nor need we linger in attempting to trace the gradual modification of the skeleton, owing to the material change in habits.

The h.o.r.n.y beak and the reduction of the toes are features we have already encountered in the reptile, and the modification of the pelvis, breast-bone, and clavicle are a natural outcome of flight.

In the Chalk period we find a large number of bird remains, of about thirty different species, and in some respects they resume the story of the evolution of the bird. They are widely removed from our modern types of birds, and still have teeth in the jaws. They are of two leading types, of which the Ichthyornis and Hesperornis are the standard specimens. The Ichthyornis was a small, tern-like bird with the power of flight strongly developed, as we may gather from the frame of its wings and the keel-shaped structure of its breast-bone. Its legs and feet were small and slender, and its long, slender jaws had about twenty teeth on each side at the bottom. No modern bird has teeth; though the fact that in some modern species we find the teeth appearing in a rudimentary form is another ill.u.s.tration of the law that animals tend to reproduce ancestral features in their development. A more reptilian character in the Ichthyornis group is the fact that, unlike any modern bird, but like their reptile ancestors, they had biconcave vertebrae. The brain was relatively poor. We are still dealing with a type intermediate in some respects between the reptile and the modern bird. The gannets, cormorants, and pelicans are believed to descend from some branch of this group.

The other group of Cretaceous birds, of the Hesperornis type, show an actual degeneration of the power of flight through adaptation to an environment in which it was not needed, as happened, later, in the kiwi of New Zealand, and is happening in the case of the barn-yard fowl.

These birds had become divers. Their wings had shrunk into an abortive bone, while their powerful legs had been peculiarly fitted for diving.

They stood out at right angles to the body, and seem to have developed paddles. The whole frame suggests that the bird could neither walk nor fly, but was an excellent diver and swimmer. Not infrequently as large as an ostrich (five to six feet high), with teeth set in grooves in its jaws, and the jaws themselves joined as in the snake, with a great capacity of bolting its prey, the Hesperornis would become an important element in the life of the fishes. The wing-fingers have gone, and the tail is much shortened, but the grooved teeth and loosely jointed jaws still point back to a reptilian ancestry.

These are the only remains of bird-life that we find in the Mesozoic rocks. Admirably as they ill.u.s.trate the evolution of the bird from the reptile, they seem to represent a relatively poor development and spread of one of the most advanced organisms of the time. It must be understood that, as we shall see, the latter part of the Chalk period does not belong to the depression, the age of genial climate, which I call the Middle Ages of the earth, but to the revolutionary period which closes it. We may say that the bird, for all its advances in organisation, remains obscure and unprosperous as long as the Age of Reptiles lasts. It awaits the next ma.s.sive uplift of the land and lowering of temperature.

In an earlier chapter I hinted that the bird and the mammal may have been the supreme outcomes of the series of disturbances which closed the Primary Epoch and devastated its primitive population. As far as the bird is concerned, this may be doubted on the ground that it first appears in the upper or later Jura.s.sic, and is even then still largely reptilian in character. We must remember, however, that the elevation of the land and the cold climate lasted until the second part of the Tria.s.sic, and it is generally agreed that the bird may have been evolved in the Tria.s.sic. Its slow progress after that date is not difficult to understand. The advantage of a four-chambered heart and warm coat would be greatly reduced when the climate became warmer. The stimulus to advance would relax. The change from a coat of scales to a coat of feathers obviously means adaptation to a low temperature, and there is nothing to prevent us from locating it in the Tria.s.sic, and indeed no later known period of cold in which to place it.

It is much clearer that the mammals were a product of the Permian revolution. They not only abound throughout the Jura.s.sic, in which they are distributed in more than thirty genera, but they may be traced into the Tria.s.sic itself. Both in North America and Europe we find the teeth and fragments of the jaws of small animals which are generally recognised as mammals. We cannot, of course, from a few bones deduce that there already, in the Tria.s.sic, existed an animal with a fully developed coat of fur and an apparatus, however crude, in the breast for suckling the young. But these bones so closely resemble the bones of the lowest mammals of to-day that this seems highly probable. In the latter part of the long period of cold it seems that some reptile exchanged its scales for tufts of hair, developed a four-chambered heart, and began the practice of nouris.h.i.+ng the young from its own blood which would give the mammals so great an ascendancy in a colder world.

Nor can we complain of any lack of evidence connecting the mammal with a reptile ancestor. The earliest remains we find are of such a nature that the highest authorities are still at variance as to whether they should be cla.s.sed as reptilian or mammalian. A skull and a fore limb from the Tria.s.sic of South Africa (Tritylodon and Theriodesmus) are in this predicament. It will be remembered that we divided the primitive reptiles of the Permian period into two great groups, the Diapsids and Synapsids (or Theromorphs). The former group have spread into the great reptiles of the Jura.s.sic; the latter have remained in comparative obscurity. One branch of these Theromorph reptiles approach the mammals so closely in the formation of the teeth that they have received the name "of the Theriodonts", or "beast-toothed" reptiles. Their teeth are, like those of the mammals, divided into incisors, canines (sometimes several inches long), and molars; and the molars have in some cases developed cusps or tubercles. As the earlier remains of mammals which we find are generally teeth and jaws, the resemblance of the two groups leads to some confusion in cla.s.sifying them, but from our point of view it is not unwelcome. It narrows the supposed gulf between the reptile and the mammal, and suggests very forcibly the particular branch of the reptiles to which we may look for the ancestry of the mammals. We cannot say that these Theriodont reptiles were the ancestors of the mammals.

But we may conclude with some confidence that they bring us near to the point of origin, and probably had at least a common ancestor with the mammals.

The distribution of the Theriodonts suggests a further idea of interest in regard to the origin of the mammals. It would be improper to press this view in the present state of our knowledge, yet it offers a plausible theory of the origin of the mammals. The Theriodonts seem to have been generally confined to the southern continent, Gondwana Land (Brazil to Australia), of which an area survives in South Africa. It is there also that we find the early disputed remains of mammals. Now we saw that, during the Permian, Gondwana Land was heavily coated with ice, and it seems natural to suppose that the severe cold which the glacial fields would give to the whole southern continent was the great agency in the evolution of the highest type of the animal world. From this southern land the new-born mammals spread northward and eastward with great rapidity. Fitted as they were to withstand the rigorous conditions which held the reptiles and amphibia in check, they seemed destined to attain at once the domination of the earth. Then, as we saw, the land was revelled once more until its surface broke into a fresh semi-tropical luxuriance, and the Deinosaurs advanced to their triumph.

The mammals shrank into a meagre and insignificant population, a scattered tribe of small insect-eating animals, awaiting a fresh refrigeration of the globe.

The remains of these interesting early mammals, restricted, as they generally are, to jaws and teeth and a few other bones that cannot in themselves be too confidently distinguished from those of certain reptiles, may seem insufficient to enable us to form a picture of their living forms. In this, however, we receive a singular and fortunate a.s.sistance. Some of them are found living in nature to-day, and their distinctly reptilian features would, even if no fossil remains were in existence, convince us of the evolution of the mammals.

The southern continent on which we suppose the mammals to have originated had its eastern termination in Australia. New Zealand seems to have been detached early in the Mesozoic, and was never reached by the mammals. Tasmania was still part of the Australian continent. To this extreme east of the southern continent the early mammals spread, and then, during either the Jura.s.sic or the Cretaceous, the sea completed its inroad, and severed Australia permanently from the rest of the earth. The obvious result of this was to shelter the primitive life of Australia from invasion by higher types, especially from the great carnivorous mammals which would presently develop. Australia became, in other words, a "protected area," in which primitive types of life were preserved from destruction, and were at the same time sheltered from those stimulating agencies which compelled the rest of the world to advance. "Advance Australia" is the fitting motto of the present human inhabitants of that promising country; but the standard of progress has been set up in a land which had remained during millions of years the Chinese Empire of the living world. Australia is a fragment of the Middle Ages of the earth, a province fenced round by nature at least three million years ago and preserving, amongst its many invaluable types of life, representatives of that primitive mammal population which we are seeking to understand.

It is now well known that the Duckbill or Platypus (Ornithorhyncus) and the Spiny Anteater (Echidna) of Australia and Tasmania--with one representative of the latter in New Guinea, which seems to have been still connected--are semi-reptilian survivors of the first animals to suckle their young. Like the reptiles they lay tough-coated eggs and have a single outlet for the excreta, and they have a reptilian arrangement of the bones of the shoulder-girdle; like the mammals, they have a coat of hair and a four-chambered heart, and they suckle the young. Even in their mammalian features they are, as the careful research of Australian zoologists has shown, of a transitional type.

They are warm-blooded, but their temperature is much lower than that of other mammals, and varies appreciably with the temperature of their surroundings. [*] Their apparatus for suckling the young is primitive.

There are no teats, and the milk is forced by the mother through simple channels upon the breast, from which it is licked by the young. The Anteater develops her eggs in a pouch. They ill.u.s.trate a very early stage in the development of a mammal from a reptile; and one is almost tempted to see in their timorous burrowing habits a reminiscence of the impotence of the early mammals after their premature appearance in the Tria.s.sic.

* See Lucas and Le Soulf's Animals of Australia, 1909.

The next level of mammal life, the highest level that it attains in Australia (apart from recent invasions), is the Marsupial. The pouched animals (kangaroo, wallaby, etc.) are the princes of pre-human life in Australia, and represent the highest point that life had reached when that continent was cut off from the rest of the world. A few words on the real significance of the pouch, from which they derive their name, will suffice to explain their position in the story of evolution.

Among the reptiles the task of the mother ends, as a rule, with the laying of the egg. One or two modern reptiles hatch the eggs, or show some concern for them, but the characteristic of the reptile is to discharge its eggs upon the warm earth and trouble no further about its young. It is a reminiscence of the warm primitive earth. The bird and mammal, born of the cooling of the earth, exhibit the beginning of that link between mother and offspring which will prove so important an element in the higher and later life of the globe. The bird a.s.sists the development of the eggs with the heat of her own body, and feeds the young. The mammal develops the young within the body, and then feeds them at the breast.

But there is a gradual advance in this process. The Duckbill lays its eggs just like the reptile, but provides a warm nest for them at the bottom of its burrow. The Anteater develops a temporary pouch in its body, when it lays an egg, and hatches the egg in it. The Marsupial retains the egg in its womb until the young is advanced in development, then transfers the young to the pouch, and forces milk into its mouth from its b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The real reason for this is that the Marsupial falls far short of the higher mammals in the structure of the womb, and cannot fully develop its young therein. It has no placenta, or arrangement by which the blood-vessels of the mother are brought into connection with the blood-vessels of the foetus, in order to supply it with food until it is fully developed. The Marsupial, in fact, only rises above the reptile in hatching the egg within its own body, and then suckling the young at the breast.

These primitive mammals help us to reconstruct the mammal life of the Mesozoic Epoch. The bones that we have are variously described in geological manuals as the remains of Monotremes, Marsupials, and Insectivores. Many of them, if not most, were no doubt insect-eating animals, but there is no ground for supposing that what are technically known as Insectivores (moles and shrews) existed in the Mesozoic. On the other hand, the lower jaw of the Marsupial is characterised by a peculiar hooklike process, and this is commonly found in Mesozoic jaws.