"Tertiary period" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the only representatives of the class during the paleozoic ages; that macrourans prevailed in the same manner during the secondary period; and that brachyurans make their appearance only in the tertiary period. Do you discover in your results any connection between such facts and the present distribution of crustacea? There is certainly one feature in their classification which must appear very striking,—that, taken on a large scale, the organic ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... that the equine quadrupeds of the Quaternary period do not differ from existing Equidae in any more important respect than these last differ from one another; and he would know that it is, nevertheless, a well-established fact that, in the course of the Tertiary period, the equine quadrupeds have undergone a series of changes exactly such as the doctrine of evolution requires. Hence sound analogical reasoning justifies the expectation that, when we obtain the remains of Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene Anthropidae, they will present ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... "During the tertiary period elephants were very numerous and were distributed over Europe, Asia as far as the Arctic Ocean, North America and Africa. By the remains excavated, many species of extinct elephants are now distinguished, among which one, known under the ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... Tertiary period the whole valley of Mexico was one great lake. Whether the proportion of water to land had adjusted itself before the country was inhabited, or whether during historical times the lakes were still gradually diminishing by the excess of evaporation over the quantity of water supplied by rain and ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... sketched some of the reasons suggestive of such a theory of derivation of species, reasons which gave it plausibility, and even no small probability, as applied to our actual world and to changes occurring since the latest tertiary period. We are well pleased at this moment to find that the conclusions we were arriving at in this respect are sustained by the very high authority and impartial judgment of Pictet, the Swiss paleontologist. In his review of Darwins book[III-5] ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... and convincing examples of descent with modification are to be found among the mammals, and nowhere more abundantly than in North America, where the series of continental formations, running through the whole Tertiary period, is remarkably full. Most of these formations contain a marvellous wealth of mammalian remains and in an unusual state of preservation. The oldest Eocene (Paleocene) has yielded a mammalian fauna which is still of prevailingly Mesozoic character, and contains but ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... in Australian goldmining, "the lower and auriferous part of the channel of an old river of the Tertiary period " ('Century'). "The lowest portion of a lead. A gutter is filled with auriferous drift or washdirt, which rests on the palaeozoic bed-rock." (Brough Smyth, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... range over the earth, and perhaps filled a more important place in nature than it does now. Its restriction to the comparatively narrow limits of the tropics is no doubt mainly due to the great alteration of climate which occurred at the close of the Tertiary period, but it may have been aided by the continuous development of varied forms of mammalian life better fitted for the contrasted seasons and deciduous vegetation of the north temperate regions. The more extensive area formerly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... us Ceylon and South India consisting mainly of granite and old-metamorphic rocks, while the greater part of the peninsula is of tertiary formation, with a few isolated patches of secondary rocks. It is evident, therefore, that during much of the tertiary period,[5] Ceylon and South India were bounded on the north by a considerable extent of sea, and probably formed part of an extensive Southern Continent or great island. The very numerous and remarkable cases of affinity with Malaya, require, however, some closer approximation with these islands, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... Before this period was a very much longer one—at least thirty times as long—during which modern quadrupeds were slowly evolving from small and primitive ancestors into their present variety of form and size. This is the Tertiary Period or Age of Mammals. Through this long period we can trace step by step the successive stages through which the ancestors of horses, camels, elephants, rhinoceroses, etc., were gradually converted into their present form in adaptation to their various habits and environment. And ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... forms of life are rendered possible, than where recurrent seasons of cold and scarcity reduce the possibilities of life to a minimum. Geology furnishes us with another reason, in the fact, that throughout the tertiary period tropical conditions prevailed far into the temperate regions, so that the possibilities of colour development were still greater than they are at the present time. The tropics, therefore, present to us the results of animal development in a much larger area ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and wild vegetation of the Tertiary period, in all its superb magnificence. Huge palms, of a species now unknown, superb palmacites—a genus of fossil palms from the coal formation—pines, yews, cypress, and conifers or cone-bearing trees, the whole bound together by an inextricable and ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne |
