"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Council of the Mureess rose solemnly and inclined their heads in his direction. They were tall bipeds of vaguely reptilian ancestry, most of their height being body. They stood on short powerful legs, terminating in flippered feet, and their long arms were flanged to the second elbow with a rubbery fin. Only four opposed fingers flexed the hands, ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier
... ophiolatry, ophiophagous, ophiography, herpetology, ophidian, ophiologic, ophiomorphous, herpetologist, herpetotomy, herpetotomist, ophiologist, ophiomancy, echidna, echidnine, fang, uraeus, serpentry, reptilian, anguiform, anguine. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... dozing off when the fat lady up the aisle let out a scream. A huge reptilian head had materialized out of nowhere and was hanging in air, peering about uncertainly. A scaly green body followed, four feet away, complete with long razor talons, heavy hind legs, and a whiplash tail with a needle at the end. For a moment the creature floated ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... certainly was, and of a species Talbot had never before laid eyes on. The bird stood on the crumbling rim of the mining shaft and regarded him with golden eyes. Its body was as large as that of a buzzard, and its head had a flat, reptilian look, unpleasant to see. Nor was that the only odd thing. The feathers glittered metallically, like blued copper, and a streak of glistening ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... half-way to Redding," mocked a reptilian and red-headed giant on the log, "and Redding is the happy ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... fishes. In the many-folded pages of the Old Red Sandstone, till we reach the highest and last, there occur the remains of no other vertebrates than those of this fourth class; but in its uppermost deposits there appear traces of the third or reptilian class; and in passing upwards still, through the Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic Systems, we find reptiles continuing the master existences of the time. The geologic volume in which these great formations are included ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... bushes. In the absence of all those she looks for a depression in the earth wherein the fawn can lie without making a hump in the landscape. The first impulse of the fawn,—even before nursing if the birth occurs in daylight,—is to fold its long legs, short body and reptilian neck into a very small package, hug the earth tightly, close its eyes and lie absolutely motionless until its mother gives the signal to arise and sup. Such infants may lie for long and weary hours without ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... their frog-like attitudes and heavy ways. Frankly, they were not beautiful, even at that stage; and a fortnight before, when they had been larger than the eggs they had come out of, they were positively reptilian and repulsive. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... occupy the intervals between Families or Orders of the same class; but the investigations which have been carried on by Professor Gegenbaur, Professor Cope, and myself into the structure and relations of the extinct reptilian forms of the Ornithoscelida (or Dinosauria and Compsognatha) have brought to light the existence of intercalary forms between what have hitherto been always regarded as very distinct classes of the vertebrate sub-kingdom, namely Reptilia and Aves. Whatever inferences ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... any closer similarity between the organic beings on the opposite sides of the Andes than on the opposite shores of the ocean. We will remark that we obtained a peccari, a number of birds not accustomed to high flights, and five reptilian species, on the Pacific slope, identical with species found ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... every class of animals, which in the state of their perfect development exemplify such prophetic relations.... The sauroid fishes of the past geological ages are an example of this kind. These fishes, which preceded the appearance of reptiles, present a combination of ichthyic and reptilian characters not to be found in the true members of this class, which form its bulk at present. The Pterodactyles, which preceded the class of birds, and the Ichthyosauri, which preceded the Cetaeca, are other examples of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... difference," Alexander said, "but it's mainly reptilian. Nothing over Group I. We'll restock ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... are all nocturnal reptiles, and there can be little doubt conceal themselves during the day in holes, so that the green protective tint would be useless to them, and they accordingly retain the more usual reptilian hues. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Frisbie. He was standing a little apart from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed, beady, black eyes, drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... breath again. But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule—for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times, with savage ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... feet, some 2, some none. All birds have two feet. The bird's structure is so well suited for flight and shows the marks of design so clearly, that the clumsy aeroplane is but a poor imitation. Yet to link the 12,000 species of birds to their unknown reptilian ancestors, they show us two fossils of the archaeopteryx, as the sum total of the evidence showing the transition from reptiles to birds. The fossil varies slightly but not essentially from other birds. It has a feathered tail, some teeth and ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... is a few drops out of a reptilian fund! No one can claim what was handed over to me without witnesses, and no receipt demanded. I make no secret: I am offering for your love the price of my honor. Only let us flee to a distance for a while. The money ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... it shell brooze ther head." And with a singleness of purpose and a rapt attention to detail that would have done credit to a lean porker garnering the strewn kernels behind a deaf old man who plants his field with corn, he started in upon that reptilian host, and exterminated it with a careful ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... menace to society," said Robert Cairn. "When I meet the reptilian glance of those black eyes of his and reflect upon what the man has attempted—what he has done—my blood boils. It is tragically funny to think that in our new wisdom we have abolished the only laws ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... that this idea is contradictory to the previous suggestion that the absorption of nourishment by the intra-uterine embryo was the cause of the gradual decline of the process of yolk-secretion by the ova in the ovary, but it is not really so. Originally in the reptilian ancestor, or in the Monotreme, the ovum in the follicle secreted yellow-coloured yolk. The materials for this, at any rate, passed through the follicle cells, and it is probable that these cells were not entirely passive, but actively secretory in the process. Substances diffusing ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... a conclusion. Carlie and Georgie bowed; Marjorie Jones and Baby Rennsdale curtesied, and there was loud applause. In fact, the demonstration became so uproarious that some measure of it was open to suspicion, especially as hisses of reptilian venomousness were commingled with it, and also a hoarse but vociferous repetition of the dastard words, "Carrie dances ROTTEN!" Again it was the work of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but the plot was attributed ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... canvas poster depicting the chief his torpid eye. Then, little by little, the poster became more vivid to his consciousness. There was a greenish-tinted person in the tent, it seemed, who thrived upon a reptilian diet. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... clever reptilian movement, which Tartlet imitated as well as he could, he managed, without showing his head above the grass, to reach the ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... horrible, somehow reptilian odor. It was the stench of jungle, dead and rotting. It was much, much worse than the smell ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... remarking in print that the ancient Athenians, that inferior race, had got ahead in their time of the modern Loco-foco ticket. But several kinds of fish have undoubtedly got ahead in this respect of the common reptilian ticket; for instead of leaving about their eggs anywhere on the loose to take care of themselves, they build a regular nest, like birds, and sit upon their eggs till the fry emerge from them. All the sticklebacks, for instance, are confirmed nest-builders: but here once more it is the male, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... on the soil are a strange mixture of the Mediterranean race; and as it is impossible to describe them, or say what they are, we will just be content with the title they are proudest of—the reptilian one of "rock scorpions"—a tough, hardy people, though, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... such linear forms, constituting a series of natural gradations between the reptile and the bird, and enabling us to understand the manner in which the reptilian has been metamorphosed into the bird type, are really to be found among a group of ancient and extinct terrestrial reptiles known as the Ornithoscelida. The remains of these animals occur throughout ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... towards the end of May, however, just as I was leaving Bronx Park to return to town, Professor Lesard, of the reptilian department, called out to me that Professor Farrago wanted to see me a moment; so I put my pipe into my pocket again and retraced my steps to the temporary, wooden building occupied by Professor Farrago, general superintendent of the Zoological Gardens. The professor, who was sitting at his desk ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... partook as per Mr. Clarke's suggestion, did not appeal so strongly to its taste. Swordfish steak, we feel, is probably a taste acquired by long and diligent application. At the first trial it seemed to the club a bit too reptilian in flavour. The club will go there again, and will hope to arrive in time to grab one of those tables by the windows, looking out over the docks and the United Fruit Company steamer which is so appropriately named the Banan; but it is the sense of the meeting that swordfish steak is not ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... he published five scientific memoirs, amongst them his classification of birds and "Remarks upon Archaeopteryx Lithographica" ("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 16 1868 pages 243-248). This creature, a bird with reptilian characters, was a suggestive object from which to popularise some of the far-reaching results of his many years' labour upon the morphology of both birds and reptiles. Thus it led to a lecture at the Royal Institution, on February 7, "On the Animals which are most ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... she did not flee, though the black coils were piled at her very feet. For she recognized the serpent. There was no mistaking that thin face and those small eyes. Moreover, a pocket-handkerchief was bound round the reptilian jaws and tied at the top of ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... between birds and reptiles—two classes of vertebrate animals which at present appear to be more widely separated than any others. Yet the interval between them is completely filled, in the mesozoic fauna, by birds which have reptilian characters, on the one side, and reptiles which have ornithic characters, on the other. So again, while the group of fishes, termed ganoids, is, at the present time, so distinct from that of the dipnoi, or mudfishes, that they have been reckoned as distinct ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and contracted it to convince herself of its reptilian sinuousness. "Do you call that a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... mighty hind-legs, and holding its mailed fore-paws before its chest, it came bounding like a colossal kangaroo through the jungle, smashing down the branches and smaller trees as it came, and balancing itself at each spring with its massive, reptilian tail. Its vast head, something like a cross between that of a monstrous horse and that of an alligator, was upborne upon a long, snaky neck, and its eyes, huge and round and lidless, were like two discs of shining and enamelled ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... popular tribute in our history. And he would have pushed on his work for that party had not the coming of the World War changed his perspective. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to saving civilization from the reptilian and atrocious Hun; that was a task, in comparison with which the fortune of a political party sank out ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... which is bound to stir in one the instinct of self-preservation. You have to be constantly alive to the danger of disagreeable annoyance from the pests that abound, or of actual bodily harm from animals of the reptilian order. ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... population spread over the earth. From one of these early reptiles the birds were evolved. Geology furnishes the missing link between the bird and the reptile in the Archaeopteryx, a bird with teeth, claws on its wings, and a reptilian tail. From another primitive reptile the important group of the mammals was evolved. We find what seem to be the transitional types in the rocks of South Africa. The scales gave way to tufts of hair, the heart evolved a fourth chamber, and thus supplied ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... indescribable gait, cat-like yet awkward, carrying his high shoulders almost hunched. He placed the lantern in a niche in the wall, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes which must haunt my dreams forever. They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had supposed possible only in the eye of the cat—and the film intermittently clouded their brightness—but I can speak ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... fancy may be roused even more strongly in darkness than by daylight. How living seem the smoulderings and the flashings of the tide on nights of phosphorescence!—how reptilian the subtle shifting of the tints of its chilly flame! Dive into such a night-sea;—open your eyes in the black-blue gloom, and watch the weird gush of lights that follow your every motion: each luminous point, as seen through the flood, like ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... desperation of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars. Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the moral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyes in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This explains why, Churches and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... one of these objects without seeing it thought he was holding some disgusting thing and threw it away. His sense of touch could present only the dampness, the coldness, and the motion, i. e., the coarsest traits of reptilian life, and the imagination built these up into a reptile and caused the consequent action. Foolish as this game seems, it is criminalistically instructive. It indicates what unbelievable illusions the sense of touch is capable of causing. To this inadequacy of the tactile ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... hands. So he sat, a monstrous figure, with his great paunch filling his white shirt like a concealed balloon, with his hideously hairy arms naked halfway, and his thick hands purple beneath the weight of his amorphously fat face, his little reptilian eyes staring ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... Ireland. Yet the Irish species are all common to England, and all the English to Belgium. It is therefore assumed that the migration of species westward having been the work of time, there was not sufficient lapse of ages to complete the fusion of the continental and British reptilian fauna, before France was separated from England and England ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... Vertebrates. Of these two groups one consists chiefly now of the Gar-Pikes of our Western waters, though the Sturgeons share also in some of their features. In these fishes there is a singular union of reptilian with fish-like characters. The systems of circulation and of respiration in them are more complicated than in the common fishes; the structure of the skull resembles that of the skull in reptiles, and they have other reptilian characters, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... its branches), and a new and fateful dynasty is founded. Although many of the reptiles will return to the water, when the land sinks once more, the type of the terrestrial quadruped is now fully evolved, and from its early reptilian form will emerge the lords of the air and the lords of the land, the birds ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... distinctive mammalian character, and to lay eggs. And, in further confirmation of this supposition, we find, in tracing the mammals and reptiles back through the geological record, that in the Permian and Triassic rocks there occur central forms which combine, in a most remarkable way, reptilian ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... toil—a steady pushing at a soggy, unresisting, yet heavy mass. And full concentration was imperative if anything was to be accomplished. The reptilian minds were as unstable as they were empty and would slip away unless firmly held. He stared motionlessly at his crystal, willing the huge reptiles to turn—to waddle back to the safe grasslands of the estate, far from ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... "I hope he does. We are great friends." Would there always be women like that in the world, she asked herself—women whose horizon ended with the beginning of sex? It was a feminine type that seemed to her as archaic as some reptilian bird of the primeval forests. How long would it be, she wondered, before it would survive only in the dry bones of genealogical scandals? As she looked after Rose Stribling's bright green car, darting like some gigantic dragon-fly up the street, her lips quivered with scorn ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... detailed, being distinctly ape-like. Thus does the egg from which man springs, a structure only one hundred and twenty-fifth of an inch in size, compress into a few weeks the results of millions of years, and set before us the history of his development from fish-like and reptilian forms, and of his more immediate descent from a hairy, tailed quadruped. That which is individual or peculiar to him, the physical and mental character inherited, is left to the slower development ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... one of the higher types nimbly and sweetly to recommend itself unto his gentle senses, it had at least to retain certain rudimentary characteristics allying it to such "dragons of the prime" as toads and snakes. His scientific sympathies were distinctly reptilian; he loved nature's vulgarians and described himself as the Zola of zoology. His wife and daughters, not having the advantage to share his enlightened curiosity regarding the works and ways of our ill-starred fellow-creatures, were, with needless austerity, excluded from what he called the Snakery, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... long-limbed variety of dinosaur, a good half smaller than the allosauri he had encountered in the tunnel. These agile creatures ran about on their hind legs with astonishing speed, using a long reptilian tail as a balance. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... beside him stricken, shrivelled, almost reptilian in her red-eyed, motionless misery. Only her eyes moved in her wrinkled, brown face, and reflected the candle standing on the mantelpiece above his head. She sat with her hands crooked over one another in her lap, like some image wrought ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... were: first, the remodeling of the classification of the whole type of fishes, fossil and living, and especially the separation of the Ganoids from all other fishes, under the rank of a distinct order; second, the recognition of those combinations of reptilian and bird-like characters in the earlier geological fishes, which led the author to call them prophetic types; and third, his discovery of an analogy between the embryological phases of the higher present fishes and the gradual ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the author has seen used with dramatic effect. An old man was describing the action of Hiiaka (the little sister of Pele) while clearing a passage for herself and her female companion with a great slaughter of the reptilian demon-horde of ma'o that came out in swarms to oppose the progress of the goddess through their territory while she was on her way to fetch Prince Lohiau. The goddess, a delicate piece of humanity in her real self, made ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Snakes! No, Punch begs the ophidian's pardon! The slimiest slug in the filthiest garden Is not so revolting as these are, These ultra-reptilian rascals, who spy Round our homes, and, for pay, would, with treacherous eye, Find flaws in the wife ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... these, as a special Australian type. . . . come the bush-turkeys or mound-makers . . . all these birds have the curious reptilian character of never sitting on their eggs, which they bury under mounds of earth or decaying vegetable matter, allowing them to be hatched by the heat of the sun, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... federated tribes of Pellucidar succeeded in overthrowing the mighty Mahars, the dominant race of reptilian monsters, and their fierce, gorilla-like ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... official of a large hospital in the neighbourhood was sent there yesterday to enquire how soon it would be safe for the convalescent patients to resume their daily airing in the Park, as to the probabilities of further lethal reptilian monsters lurking within ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... close on the leader like a bear-trap, but the loosely braided strands of baru fiber slip between the pointed teeth. The leader holds. The natives haul at the line as sailors haul at a halliard. Soon there emerges from the churning waters a long and incredibly ugly snout, followed by a low, reptilian head, with venomous, heavy-lidded, scarlet eyes, a body as broad as a row-boat and armored with horny scales, and finally a tremendous tail, twice as long as an elephant's trunk and twice as powerful, that spells death for ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... with a few mild tricks. Shuffle the Brogan followed Hot Back. Thorpe took all of it good-naturedly. Finally a tall individual with a thin white face, a reptilian forehead, reddish hair, and long baboon arms, suggested tossing in a blanket. Thorpe looked at the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... helpless apprehension burst from the brigantine's company as one of those suspicious logs stirred into reptilian life. A great, warty snout jutted upwards, with a swift half-turn towards the intruder, and the yellow water was swept into a furious whirlpool as the saurian secured leverage to turn by a convulsion of his ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... pigment of a small American lizard is converted into uric acid under the prolonged action of boiling hydrochloric acid.[10] This cannot be an isolated instance; and there is reason to believe that the reptilian class daubs ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... scattered and disconnected; no complete skeleton has yet been discovered, nor has any foot been found; so that no direct comparison can be made with the steps. It is, however, my belief, from all we know of the character of the Animal Kingdom in those days, that these animals were reptilian, but combined, like so many of the early types, characters of their own class with those of higher animals yet to come. It seems to me probable, that, in those tracks where one toe is turned backward, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Wyoming fossil fields, but it was lamentably short of funds, appropriations—ah—and so on. Hambridge and I were talking of the matter. A very adequate man indeed, Hambridge. Possibly you've read some of his writings. He wrote Lesser Reptilian Life in the Jurassio. Are ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... only reptiles I had ever seen upon Barsoom, but I knew from their similarity to the fossilized remains of supposedly extinct species I had seen in the museums of Helium that they comprised many of the known prehistoric reptilian genera, as well as ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... snare Shann had set, watching the Terran steadily as if there were no difficulty in seeing through the brilliance of the beam to the man who held it. And, oddly enough, Shann experienced no repulsion toward its reptilian appearance as he had upon first sighting the beetle-Throg. On impulse he put down his torch on a rock and walked into the light to face squarely the thing out ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... tail armed with plates. These it has a habit of rubbing together, and by this means it produces a shrill, chirruping sound, which actually attracts crickets and grasshoppers toward the noise, so that they fall easy prey to this reptilian trapper. So in colour, sound, motion, and many other ways, animals act and react upon each other, a useful and necessary habit being perverted by an enemy, so that the death of the creature results. Yet it would never be claimed that the lizard thought out ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and determinedly hold all possible avenues ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... such eyes?" said Vansittart Smith to himself. "There is something saurian about them, something reptilian. There's the membrana nictitans of the snakes," he mused, bethinking himself of his zoological studies. "It gives a shiny effect. But there was something more here. There was a sense of power, of wisdom—so I read them—and of weariness, utter weariness, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the latter, the most important are species belonging to the genera Megalichthys and Rhizodus, comprising large fishes, with rhomboidal scales, unsymmetrical ("heterocercal") tails, and powerful conical teeth. These fishes are sometimes said to be "sauroid," from their presenting some Reptilian features in their organisation, and they must have been the scourges of the Carboniferous seas. The remains of Placoid fishes in the Carboniferous strata are very numerous, but consist wholly of teeth and fin-spines, referable to forms more or less closely allied to our existing Port ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... across a mighty gorge, its sides clothed with perpendicular gardens and vineyards, and with little gray towns clustering under the ledges on its sheer walls like mud-daubers' nests beneath an eave. Now, perched on a ridgy outcrop of rock like a single tooth in a snaggled reptilian jaw, would be a deserted tower, making a fellow think of the good old feudal days when the robber barons robbed the traveler instead of as at present, when the job is so completely attended to by the pirates who weigh and ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb |
