Extinct Monsters

"The historian or the antiquary may have traversed the fields of ancient or of modern battles, and may have pursued the line of march of triumphant conquerors, whose armies trampled down the most mighty kingdoms of the world. The winds and storms have utterly obliterated the ephemeral impressions in their course. Not a track remains of a single foot or a single hoof of all the countless millions of men and beasts whose progress spread desolation over the earth.

But the reptiles that crawled upon the half-finished surface of our infant planet have left memorials of their passage, enduring and indelible. Centuries and thousands of years have rolled away, between the time in which these footsteps were impressed upon the sands of their native Scotland, and the hour when they were again laid bare and exposed to our curious and admiring eyes.

Yet we behold them stamped upon the rock, distinct as the track of the passing animal upon the recent snow; as if to show that thousands of years are but as nothing amidst eternity, and, as it were, in mockery of the fleeting perishable course of the mightiest potentates among mankind."

[Professor William Buckland* in an address to the Geological Society; sometime before 1856]