Ammonites, or Snake-Stones.
In the seas of the mesozoic or mediæval period, new forms of life appear upon the scene. A remarkable change has taken place in the cephalopods; for the chambered and straightened Orthoceratites and many other families of the order have passed away, and the spiral Ammonites, branching out into numerous genera, and more than 600 species, now flourish in the seas, so that in some places the rocks seem, as it were, composed of them alone. Some are of small dimensions, others upwards of three feet in diameter. They are met with in the Alps, and have been found in the Himalaya Mountains, at elevations of 16,000 feet, as eloquent witnesses of the vast revolutions of which our earth has been the scene. Carnivorous, and resembling in habits the Nautili, their small and feeble representatives of the present day, their immense multiplication proves how numerous must have been the molluscs, crustaceans, and annelides, on which they fed, all like them widely different from those of the present day.
Belemnites.
a. B. acutus.
b. Belemnite (restored).
Then also flourished the Belemnites (Thunder-stones), supposed by the ancients to be the thunderbolts of Jove, but now known to be the petrified internal bones of a race of voracious ten-armed cuttle-fishes, whose importance in the oolitic or cretaceous seas may be judged of by the frequency of their remains, and the 120 species that have been hitherto discovered. Belemnites two feet long have been found, so that, to judge by analogies, the animals to which they belonged as cuttle-bones must have measured eighteen or twenty feet from end to end, a size which reduces the rapacious Onychoteuthis of the present seas to dwarfish dimensions.
Ichthyosaurus communis.
But of all the denizens of the mesozoic seas none were more formidable than the gigantic Saurians, whose approach put even the voracious sharks to flight. The first of these monsters that raises its frightful head above the waters is the dreadful Ichthyosaurus, a creature thirty or even fifty feet long, half fish, half lizard, and combining in strange assemblage the snout of the porpoise, the teeth of the crocodile, and the paddles of the whale. Singular above all is the enormous eye, in size surpassing a man's head. Woe to the fish that meets its appalling glance! No rapidity of flight, no weapon, be it sword or saw, avails, for the long-tailed gigantic saurian darts like lightning through the water, and its dense harness bids defiance to every attack. Not only have fifteen distinct species of Ichthyosauri been distinguished, but the remains of crushed and partially digested fish-bones and scales, which are found within their skeleton, indicate the precise nature of their food. Their fossil remains abound along the whole extent of the lias formation, from the coasts of Dorset, through Somerset and Leicestershire to the coast of Yorkshire, but the largest specimens have been found in Franconia.
