A BIG "LITTLE FINGER" AND WHAT IT WAS FOR
Mr. Pterodactyl means "finger toe." What is our little finger was the longest of his five digits. It helped support and operate that big bat-like wing extending from his arms to his toes.
THE EARLIEST RULERS OF THE SEA
The first monsters, like the first of almost everything else, including the land itself, were in the sea.[5] For a time giant fish, armor-plated like a man-of-war, and with awful appetites, just about ran everything. Then came the reign of the sharks. Some of them had jaws that opened to the height of a door—six feet or over. Next in succession, as rulers of the sea, were the fish-lizards, of whom that hinge-jawed Mesosaur was one. Of another of these fish-lizards a famous teacher of Edinburgh University, Professor Blackie, wrote that funny verse at the head of this chapter. The bones of this particular specimen were found sticking out of a cliff at Lyme-Regis, a popular watering-place in the English Channel, by a pretty English girl who was strolling along the beach.
A FAMILY PARTY
The imagination of the artist enables us to picture this family party—Mrs. Ichthyosaurus and her children out for a stroll in prehistoric waters.
The Ichthyosaurus, as Professor Blackie says in his verse, was some thirty feet long, with a comparatively large head—like an alligator's—set close to his body. Another fish-lizard, well and unfavorably known by his neighbors of the sea, was the Plesiosaurus. Instead of fins he had big paddles resembling those of the seal. He was a kind of side-wheeler, like the Mississippi River steamboats, and he could go like everything! His neck was long and he darted after the smaller creatures he lived on.