HOW THE WISE MEN ANSWER THE PUZZLES
By their marvellous skill and their knowledge of the mechanics of monster anatomy the paleontologists fit one bone fragment to another, supply the missing parts in artificial material, and behold! the monsters take their places in the long procession of the ages. There has been nothing equal to it since the vision of the prophet in the Valley of Dry Bones. (Ezekiel 37:1-10.)
II. How the Monsters Died and Returned to Dust
"But you said these monsters lived in the sea and in swamps. Then how, in the name of common sense, did their bones get up into the mountains?"
WHEN THE INLAND SEA WENT DRY
Well, it's like this: As I said a while back, in the days of the monster fish and the monster lizards, there was a great sea reaching clear from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, and with swamps along the borders extending far into lands that afterward became the Rocky Mountains. When the land began to rise, due to the shrinking of the earth—a thing that has been going on ever since the earth was born—the sea and the swamps went dry, and far to the west the land wrinkled up into the Rocky Mountains. In these layers of rock that made the mountains were the bones of the monsters that had died when the rocks were still mud, in the swamps and along the borders of the inland sea.
Not only did the land under the western portion of the sea slowly rise until the waters were completely closed in on the west, and the sea thus made that much narrower, but the rise of the land on the south cut off connection with the great salt ocean which surrounds the continents to-day. So the salt-water fish, for lack of salt water, died, and with them the monsters like the Ichthyosaurus that lived on the salt-water fish that lived in this salt sea.
But it wasn't alone that the seas grew narrower and more shallow because of the elevation of the lands. The mountains rising in the west, cut off the rain-laden winds which blew from the Pacific in those days just as they do now. Thus the seas dried up so much the faster. But first, before the sea went entirely dry, its place was taken by the lakes and swamps into which it shrivelled up. Low, swampy land is just what reptiles like, so this was their Golden Age, just as the previous time of the wide, deep sea was the Golden Age of the big fish and the fish-lizards.
Then, as the land still rose and the climate grew dryer, the reptiles passed away, and in came the mammal family, to which the cows and the horses and the cats and the kittens, and all the rest of us, belong.