Mesozoic times were, _par excellence_, the age of monsters; for the Triassic (the New Red Sandstone), Jurassic and Cretaceous eras marked the reign of the reptiles. Great dinosaurs sleep still in the Triassic strata of the Atlantic border and in the Jurassic of the Western states, to be unearthed from time to time and be given mausolea in our museums. Gigantic they were and very literally possessed the earth. In Europe they were substantially as in America during these mesozoic eras, and showed their dominance by long survival in time as well as world-wide distribution in space; for they lived all the way from Kansas to New Zealand and from the Trias to the Upper Cretaceous. It is supposed by Professor Osborn that many of them, like the herbivorous brontosaurus, waded in marshes, not wholly unlike in habit to the modern hippopotamus. Others were land-stalking carnivores, like the megalosaurs of a little later date. Of enormous size, the largest exceeded any animal which has ever lived, the whales alone excepted; the biggest, the atlantosaurus and the brontosaurus, reaching a length of sixty feet. For all their bulk they had scant brains, just enough to enable them to feed and wallow, probably. It is interesting to note that many of the reptiles, the less adventurous, apparently reverted to the sea. For though the crocodilians existed already in the Trias, the plesiosaurians did not come in till the Middle Trias in Europe, and the sea-serpents (mosasaurus) till the Upper Cretaceous. Though the dinosaurs dominated life in those days, higher forms, their descendants, unnoticed were gradually creeping in, eventually to supplant them. For brain was making its way unobtrusively in the earliest of the mammals, diminutive creatures at first and of the lowest type. First appearing in the Trias as something approaching the missing link between reptiles and mammals, they later developed into monotremes and marsupials, not rising in differentiation above the latter order to the end of Mesozoic times. And this both in the old world and the new. In the Jurassic, too, flying lizards and the first birds appeared, showing their pedigree in their teeth.