FIRST ANIMALS THAT WALKED ON LEGS

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2644, 13 October 1919, Page 3

FIRST ANIMALS THAT WALKED ON LEGS

There is a very interesting region fur the geologist near Trenton Falls, m.irtli of Utica. N.V., abounding in rare fossils, because many millions of years ago, it was part of the Hour of tin; sea. Alnlt!(mies of animals of numerous specie* many of which have been long extinct, crawled over that sea door and swam in 11; • > water. When they died it often I ap.pened that they beeame embedded in ;<> -oft 00/e that -covered the bottom of (hi- vanished sea. and thus is comes about (hat quantities of their remains—at all events, the cast which scientists call fossils-‘are . preserved to this day in the solid lochs of the Trenton limestone formation. As a schoolboy'.' said Doctor Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. " I became interested in digging (bein out. I found it rather exciting to go exploring in a country o’ such vast anliipiity. and to learn some thing about its inhabitants, whose period -,f .•xislcnce long antedated tin* time when the first animal with a backbone appeared on the earth. Among them were many strange molinsks, unknown to the modern world, and some of these huge in size. Also extinct species of crustaceans, in some eases gigantic, which were the forerunners and perhaps the ancestors of our lobsters and crabs. They may have been, md very likely were, the first animals that walked on legs.”