Fishes and crustaceans, or lobster-like creatures, crawled and squattered through the slime, pursued by salamander-like animals with weak limbs and a long tail. Some of these latter were seven to eight feet long. Millipedes, scorpions, beetles and maybugs existed, and huge dragonflies preyed on them. But there is one very ancient group of trees, the Araucarias or Monkey-puzzles, which are by no means uncommon even now. The ordinary one (_Araucaria imbricata_) is often planted in the British Isles, and it has, if you look closely at it, a most peculiar appearance. It is like the sort of tree that a child would draw; it is a clumsy attempt at one, and very different from the exquisite irregularity of the ash or oak. Its leaves are especially curious: they cover the branches very closely, and are hard, rigid, and spiny. Its cones, though of the nature of pine-cones, are yet quite unique. The seeds are edible, and used to be an important article of diet to the Indians on the slopes of the Chilian Andes, where monkey-puzzle forests used to exist. This of course is a very out-of-the-way region; other species of Araucaria are found scattered about the world in a most perplexing manner. One kind grows in Norfolk Island, in the Pacific; another occurs in the inner mountainous districts of Brazil; there are some in Australia and others in New Caledonia. But in the Jurassic period of geology, in the age of ammonites and gigantic lizards and crocodiles, Araucarias were the regular, ordinary trees. They grew all over Europe, and apparently as far north as Greenland, and, indeed, seem to have existed everywhere. Perhaps the spiny leaves discouraged some huge lizard, perhaps Atlantosaurus himself (he was thirty feet high and one hundred feet long), from browsing on its branches. Perhaps the Pterodactyls, those extraordinary bird or bat-like lizards, used to feed upon the seeds of the monkey-puzzle, and carried them in their toothed jaws to New Caledonia, Australia, and Norfolk Island. Other improved types have driven the monkey-puzzles from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and taken their places, but in out-of-the-way districts of South America and Australia they are still able to hold their own. An ally of theirs, the Ginkgo or Maidenhair tree, seems to have been extremely common in certain geological periods. To-day it has almost entirely disappeared. A few trees were discovered in certain Chinese temples, where they had been preserved as curiosities for centuries, but it is almost extinct as a wild plant. The Bigtree group (_Sequoia_ p. 47) was a companion of the Ginkgo in its flourishing period. So also were the Sago palms or Cycads. All the ordinary trees, Pines, Oaks, Beeches, and the like, did not appear upon the earth's surface till a much later period.