Geological Succession of Vertebrata.
The lowest forms of vertebrates are the fishes, and these appear first in the geological record in the Upper Silurian formation. The most ancient known fish is a Pteraspis, one of the bucklered ganoids or plated fishes—by no means a very low type—allied to the sturgeon (Accipenser) and alligator-gar (Lepidosteus), but, as a group, now nearly extinct. Almost equally ancient are the sharks, which under various forms still abound in our seas. We cannot suppose these to be nearly the earliest fishes, especially as the two lowest orders, now represented by the Amphioxus or lancelet and the lampreys, have not yet been found fossil. The ganoids were greatly developed in the Devonian era, and continued till the Cretaceous, when they gave way to the true osseous fishes, which had first appeared in the Jurassic period, and have continued to increase till the present day. This much later appearance of the higher osseous fishes is quite in accordance with evolution, although some of the very lowest forms, the lancelet and the lampreys, together with the archaic ceratodus, have survived to our time.
The Amphibia, represented by the extinct labyrinthodons, appear first in the Carboniferous rocks, and these peculiar forms became extinct early in the Secondary period. The labyrinthodons were, however, highly specialised, and do not at all indicate the origin of the class, which may be as ancient as the lower forms of fishes. Hardly any recognisable remains of our existing groups—the frogs, toads, and salamanders—are found before the Tertiary period, a fact which indicates the extreme imperfection of the record as regards this class of animals.
True reptiles have not been found till we reach the Permian where Prohatteria and Proterosaurus occur, the former closely allied to the lizard-like Sphenodon of New Zealand, the latter having its nearest allies in the same group of reptiles—Rhyncocephala, other forms of which occur in the Trias. In this last-named formation the earliest crocodiles—Phytosaurus (Belodon) and Stagonolepis occur, as well as the earliest tortoises—Chelytherium, Proganochelys, and Psephoderma.[195] Fossil serpents have been first found in the Cretaceous formation, but the conditions for the preservation of these forms have evidently been unfavourable, and the record is correspondingly incomplete. The marine Plesiosauri and Ichthyosauri, the flying Pterodactyles, the terrestrial Iguanodon of Europe, and the huge Atlantosaurus of Colorado—the largest land animal that has ever lived upon the earth[196]—all belong to special developments of the reptilian type which flourished during the Secondary epoch, and then became extinct.
Birds are among the rarest of fossils, due, no doubt, to their aerial habits removing them from the ordinary dangers of flood, bog, or ice which overwhelm mammals and reptiles, and also to their small specific gravity which keeps them floating on the surface of water till devoured. Their remains were long confined to Tertiary deposits, where many living genera and a few extinct forms have been found. The only birds yet known from the older rocks are the toothed birds (Odontornithes) of the Cretaceous beds of the United States, belonging to two distinct families and many genera; a penguin-like form (Enaliornis) from the Upper Greensand of Cambridge; and the well-known long-tailed Archaeopteryx from the Upper Oolite of Bavaria. The record is thus imperfect and fragmentary in the extreme; but it yet shows us, in the few birds discovered in the older rocks, more primitive and generalised types, while the Tertiary birds had already become specialised like those living, and had lost both the teeth and the long vertebral tail, which indicate reptilian affinities in the earlier
Mammalia have been found, as already stated, as far back as the Trias formation, in Europe in the United States and in South Africa, all being very small, and belonging either to the Marsupial order, or to some still lower and more generalised type, out of which both Marsupials and Insectivora were developed. Other allied forms have been found in the Lower and Upper Oolite both of Europe and the United States. But there is then a great gap in the whole Cretaceous formation, from which no mammal has been obtained, although both in the Wealden and the Upper Chalk in Europe, and in the Upper Cretaceous deposits of the United States an abundant and well-preserved terrestrial flora has been discovered. Why no mammals have left their remains here it is impossible to say. We can only suppose that the limited areas in which land plants have been so abundantly preserved, did not present the conditions which are needed for the fossilisation and preservation of mammalian remains.
When we come to the Tertiary formation, we find mammals in abundance; but a wonderful change has taken place. The obscure early types have disappeared, and we discover in their place a whole series of forms belonging to existing orders, and even sometimes to existing families. Thus, in the Eocene we have remains of the opossum family; bats apparently belonging to living genera; rodents allied to the South American cavies and to dormice and squirrels; hoofed animals belonging to the odd-toed and even-toed groups; and ancestral forms of cats, civets, dogs, with a number of more generalised forms of carnivora. Besides these there are whales, lemurs, and many strange ancestral forms of proboscidea.[197]
The great diversity of forms and structures at so remote an epoch would require for their development an amount of time, which, judging by the changes that have occurred in other groups, would carry us back far into the Mesozoic period. In order to understand why we have no record of these changes in any part of the world, we must fall back upon some such supposition as we made in the case of the dicotyledonous plants. Perhaps, indeed, the two cases are really connected, and the upland regions of the primeval world, which saw the development of our higher vegetation, may have also afforded the theatre for the gradual development of the varied mammalian types which surprise us by their sudden appearance in Tertiary times.
GEOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MAMMALIA.