Omaha daily bee., 1903-05-31

after years OF systematic exploitation, lou
to 200 ichthyosaurians are found there
every year.
The quarry owners and workme in the
Swabian quarries have made a regular ar
ticle of commerce of them. They calculate
that they will find a 'beastie' for about
every square rood of excavation.
Buyers are plentiful. Museums, private
collectors, even schools go there for ma
terial as If they were buying some regular
crop. mo horse trade says Fraas, 'is
conducted with more shrewdness and
eenness than the saurian trade, and no
business requires more knowledge of the
tricks of the trade"
The big supply has forced prices down,
so that it is possible to get an ichthyosaurus
of the common kinds for from SIS to $50.
OF course, specimens of great scientific
value cost more. The workmen have
learned to examine each new find closely
to see If II is a paw animal or one with
fippers. The creature with paws" ranks
far beyond the cheap ichthyosaurian price
list; it is a much less common reptile of
the Jurassic period, the teleosaurus. 1t
belongs to the ancestors of our crocodiles,
and, like them, it had 'paws"-four reg
ular feet for crawling quite different from
the ichthyosaurus with its characteristic
whales f1ippers.
liz Clb oau NS WoS oA NNoAAN III
imal.
Everything of animal remnants that has
been found in it's company-mollusks, crabs
and fsh-is from the sea. Sea creatures
were it's food. We know exactly what its
pet dishes were.
A black spot between the ribs of many
specimens shows us where the creatures
stomach was; the investigator discovers
in the petrifed contents of that stomach
the distinctive scales of some fish that are
related to our sturgeon and that thronged
the sea in the older times Of world story.
There is also the fossilized debris of the
hard parts of cuttleish. Neither today
nor. demonstratably, at any time have cut
fetish dwelled in fresh water. Whatever
hunted them must have been an inhabi-
tant of the ocean. like our sperm whale.
But how could the ocean have washed the
shores of Swabia in Germany
The lcyman still likes to picture the world
of ancient epochs as a vast primeval sea,
from which the continents uprose only very
gradually in the form of tiny islands. But
II this obtained at all, 1t must have been
early in the beginning of earthly things in
the mist of time. In the period of the
ichthyosaurus. things already had become
vastly different.
In that day there were no Alps in Europe.
If heaven-ascending mountains stood at
all in Europe they must have been In an
other part OF it, possibly In the northeast.
Over the site of the Swiss and Tyrolean
Alps and the Swabian Jura mountains the
ocean rolled it's food. II there was land at
all where the Alps are now they were
chains of islands at most. probably re-
sembling the present South Sea islands very
closely-with coral reefs extending far into
the sea, with forests of tropical fern palms.
AaA- a-I NAAa, Nhn
smoke pillar of an active volcano.
The deep sea-, crowded with animal
swarms, stood over the whole Swabian and
Frankish land of today, and It was far in
the northeast that it's mighty waves first
met a continental continent which poured
great rivers into 1t from the east. carrying
down mud for the vast alluvial deposits
that now are visible to us in the form of
the black Jura mountains.
The ichthyosaurians must have swum to
this coast even before the beginning of the
true Jurassic period. We find individual
vertebrate in the Triassic deposits OF the
Black forest. With the Jurassic epoch.
when the Swabian sea spread afar-a great
blue mirror of considerable depth-the
strange guests arrived in steadily increas-
ing numbers
They must have lived a most gregariOus
life. Such a wonderful massing together
of creatures as is found i'm these German
ichthyosaurian catacombs can only be ex-
planned as being due to the fact that the
monsters dwelled for a long period In a
comparatively limited locality, made at
t~ractive, perhaps. on account of its excel
lence of food supply.
OF course it would be entirely incorrect
to imagine the sea of those old days as
being filled everywhere with great mon
sters. The mass of animal life that swan,
crawled. trampled. hoped and few over
this planet throughout all the epochs Of
geological time was, no doubt, incOnceiv-
ably vast. But these myriads were dis
tributed through millions of years, and
there is no evidence that the number OF
single forms ever was greater at anV time