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Flying Reptiles

The Flying Reptiles, Pterodactyls, or as Professor Seeley has aptly termed them, Dragons of the Air, were passed over in previous editions of this book, but they well deserve a chapter, the more that when the Mosasaurs were the rulers of the seas the pterodactyls held and had held for ages the empire of the air. For in the Jurassic, when birds in the shape of Archæopteryx were just beginning to flutter, pterodactyls had long since solved the problem of flight and were present, big and little, in swarms. They must have been particularly abundant about the Solenhofen Sea of Central Europe whose soft, muddy bottom, long ago hardened to rock, furnishes the best lithographic stone, for in this stone beautifully preserved by Nature's lithography occur the remains of many species ranging in size from that of a sparrow to that of a hawk.