[Illustration: MARSUPITES ORNATUS. CHALK.]
Of all the changes that have taken place in organic life, none perhaps are more remarkable than the transformations which the Cephalopod molluscs have undergone during the various geological eras. In the more ancient Palæozoic seas flourished the Orthoceratites, or straight- chambered shells, resembling a nautilus uncoiled. In the Carboniferous ages the Goniatites acquired their highest development. These shells were spirally wound, having the lobes of the chambers free from lateral denticulations or crenatures, so as to form continuous and uninterrupted outlines.
Both Orthoceratites and Goniatites disappear in the Triassic times, and are replaced by hosts of Ammonites, which successively flourished in more than 600 species, and are characterised by an external siphon and chambers of complicated, often foliated, pattern. This foliated structure gives a remarkable character to the intersection of the chamber partitions with the shell, and must have added greatly to the strength of the shell, which was always delicate and often very beautiful. The Ammonites, which made their first appearance towards the end of the Triassic period, abounded in the Oolitic and Cretaceous periods, and were replaced by new forms before the Tertiary beds were deposited. Among these we find the _Ancyloceras gigas_, which may be regarded as an Ammonite partially unrolled, and the _Turrilites tuberculatus_, which has the form and peculiar symmetry of a univalve shell.
In several of the older rocks, especially the Lias and Oolite, Belemnites are frequently met with. These singular dart- or arrow-shaped fossils were supposed by the ancients to be the thunderbolts of Jove, but are now known to be the petrified internal bones of a race of voracious cuttle-fishes, whose importance in the Oolitic or Cretaceous Seas may be judged of by the frequency of their remains and the 120 species that have been hitherto discovered.
Belemnites two feet long have been found, so that, to judge by analogies, the animals to which they belonged as cuttle-bones must have measured eighteen or twenty feet from end to end. Provided with prehensile hooks on their long arms, and with a formidable parrot-like bill, these huge creatures must have proved most dangerous antagonists, even to the well-protected fishes that lived in the same seas. But of all the denizens of the Mesozoic Ocean none were more powerful than the large marine or enaliosaurian reptiles, which, flourishing throughout the whole of the Triassic period, were lords of all they surveyed down to the end of the Cretaceous epoch. First among these monsters appears the gigantic Ichthyosaurus, which has been found no less than forty feet long—a creature half fish, half lizard, and combining, in strange juxtaposition, the snout of the porpoise, the teeth of the crocodile, and the paddles of the whale. But the most remarkable of its features is the eye, surpassing a man’s head in size, and wonderfully adapted for vision both far and near.