d water
were dominated by reptiles, some of which attained to gigantic size. Had
there been any zoologist in those days, he would have been very
sagacious indeed if he had suspected that reptiles did not represent the
climax of creation.

The Flying Dragons

The _Jurassic_ period showed a continuance of the reptilian splendour.
They radiated in many directions, becoming adapted to many haunts. Thus
there were many Fish Lizards paddling in the seas, many types of
terrestrial dragons stalking about on land, many swiftly gliding
alligator-like forms, and the Flying Dragons which began in the Triassic
attained to remarkable success and variety. Their wing was formed by the
extension of a great fold of skin on the enormously elongated outermost
finger, and they varied from the size of a sparrow to a spread of over
five feet. A soldering of the dorsal vertebrae as in our Flying Birds was
an adaptation to striking the air with some force, but as there is not
more than a slight keel, if any, on the breast-bone, it is unlikely that
they could fly far. For we know from our modern birds that the power of
flight may be to some extent gauged from the degree of development of
the keel, which is simply a great ridge for the better insertion of the
muscles of flight. It is absent, of course, in the Running Birds, like
the ostrich, and it has degenerated in an interesting way in the
burrowing parrot (_Stringops_) and a few other birds that have "gone
back."

The First Known Bird

But the Jurassic is particularly memorable because its strata have
yielded two fine specimens of the first known bird, _Archaeopteryx_.
These were entombed in the deposits which formed the fine-grained
lithographic stones of Bavaria, and practically every bone in the body
is preserved except the breast-bone. Even the feathers have left their
marks with distinctness. This oldest known bird--too far advanced to be
the first bird--was about the size of a crow and was probably of
arboreal habits. Of great interest are its reptilian features, so
pronounced that one cannot evade the evolutionist suggestion. It had
teeth in both jaws, which no modern bird has; it had a long lizard-like
tail, which no modern bird has; it had claws on three fingers, and a
sort of half-made wing. That is to say, it does not show, what all
modern birds show, a fusion of half the wrist-bones with the whole of
the palm-bones, the well-known carpo-metacarpus bone which forms a basis