Water Reptiles of the Past and Present

In most persons the word reptile incites only feelings of disgust and abhorrence; to many it means a serpent, a cold, gliding, treacherous, and venomous creature shunning sunlig...

There is very much doubt, very much uncertainty, among paleontologists about the classification of reptiles. No two writers agree on the number of orders, or the rank of many fo...

The bony framework, or skeleton, that which gives form and stature to the body, and which serves for the support of the soft parts and the attachment of muscles, is, with rare e...

Geologists divide the history of the earth, since life first appeared upon it, into four general eras, the Proterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, that is, into eras of...

In the never-ceasing struggle for existence all forms of life upon the earth, whether consciously or unconsciously, are continuously striving for improvement; striving to flee f...

Very scanty are the early human records of those strange reptiles known as the plesiosaurs. Were one to search through the many works published during the latter half of the sev...

Over a large area of South Africa, chiefly along the Orange River and its tributaries, there is an extensive series of deposits many hundreds of feet in thickness, usually calle...

Early in the eighteenth century a curious work in the Latin language was published by a famous physician and naturalist—a professor in the University of Altorf by the name of Sc...

There is some doubt whether those little creatures of Paleozoic times, to which some years ago the late Professor Baur gave the ordinal name Proganosauria, are really entitled t...

The genus _Protorosaurus_ is of peculiar interest, as one of the first, if not the first, known fossil reptiles, described by Spener as long ago as 1710 as a crocodile, from fra...

The order Squamata, so called because of the dermal covering of overlapping horny scales, comprises the great majority of living reptiles. Although the scaly covering is charact...

Millions of years before the first appearance of the mosasaurs in geological history, another group of reptiles showing many curious resemblances to them attempted a rather prec...

In some of the small islands near the northeast coast of New Zealand certain small and peculiar, lizard-like reptiles, known as tuateras, have long been known. For many years th...

The first known specimen of the order of reptiles now generally known as the Parasuchia was found in Würtemberg, Germany, in 1826 and very briefly and inadequately described[4]...

The order of reptiles to which the name Crocodilia is technically applied comprises less than twenty-five living species, popularly known as crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and...

No order of reptiles of the past or present is more sharply and unequivocally distinguished from all others than the Chelonia or Testudinata. No order has had a more uniformly c...