These Pareiasaurs reconstructed by Professor Amalitzky were about as big as well-grown cattle, but not so high on the legs. Living at the same time, and its skeleton now found near them, was an enormous and truly terrible flesh-eating animal, with a skull two feet long and enormous tiger-like teeth. This creature was named Inostransevia. No doubt the vegetarian herds of Pareiasaurus, whose small peg-like teeth indicate their harmlessness, were preyed on by the terrible Inostransevia, as were their brethren in South Africa devoured by other carnivorous reptiles of that remote Triassic age. So we see the co-existence of blood-sucker and victim--of the destructive oppressor and the helpless oppressed--forced on our attention in these two localities, Russia and South Africa, in days long before man was. Other land forms were grotesque and curious in shape, the Chelonians for example, big birds and crocodiles rolled into one, and clothed in lizard-like skin--queer pear-shaped brutes with huge hind limbs, short fore limbs, narrow chests, and pigmy skulls. Both branches of the reptilian horde, those representing the saurians and those which were the forerunners of the mammals, sent delegations to the sea before the close of the Triassic period. The Ichthyosaurs represented the more pronounced reptilian line; the Plesiosaurs were the representatives of the coming mammals. It is not difficult to find good reason for this movement to the sea. Besides the inevitable tendency of every masterful race to invade all accessible realms, the renewed extension of the sea that set in during the Triassic period and became pronounced before its close, especially invited this, for the shallow waters creeping out upon the land with their now prolific life set tempting morsels before the voracious reptiles, on the one hand, while on the other, the reduction of the land area and the restriction of their feeding-grounds, intensified by the multiplication of the reptiles themselves, forced a resort to the sea. One of the reptiles of this period, the _Lariosaurus_, shows by its development how the change affected the reptiles. In the earlier stages of the Trias it resembled a rather swollen alligator with four limbs symmetrically situated and used for crawling. In the later forms of these reptiles the limbs were modified with paddles, and all power to move about on land was lost. CHAPTER XX THE AGE OF REPTILES (_Continued._)