Transcribe Notice of the Ward cabinets...the University of Rochester (1863)

                                 CABINET OF GEOLOGY.                                                         17

                                      MEZOZOIC AGE. 

The fossils of the Mesozoic time, - the Age of Reptiles, - are arranged in the three middle rooms on the south side of the Hall; the series including the organisms of the Trias, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The specimens are in the main from European localities, many of which have become classic ground, from the forms which they have furnished for the investigations and descriptions of Agassiz, Buckland, Cuvier, D'Orbigny, Mantell, Owen, and other eminent Paleontologists.

The Trias division offers many perfect specimens of the beautiful Stone Lilies from Brunswick, and interesting Cephalopod shells, - Ceratites, Ammonites, Orthoceratites, Nautilus, - from other localities of the Muschelkalk formation in France and Wurtemburg, and from the variegated marls of St, Cassian in the Tyrol. Vertebrate life is here also represented by many highly interesting remains of Fishes, Reptiles and Birds. Among the Reptilian remains stands the head (2 feet long) of the Labryinthodon. The whole body of this huge Batrachian - estimated to have been nine feet in length, - is represented by an ideal model, on a reduced scale. Its tracks (Cheriotherium) are also preserved on a number of genuine slabs of sandstone from Saxony. Three of these slabs are, respectively, hree [sic], four and seven feet long, each one exhibiting several distinct steps upon its surface. The Bird-tracks, from the red sandstone of the valley of the Connecticut - whose history has been so carefully worked at by Prof. Hitchcock and illustrated in the immense cabinet of Ichnology collected by him at Amherst College, - are here represented by many interesting and remarkable specimens, Some of these single tracks are over a foot in length from heel to toe.

In the Jurassic period, - Lias, Oolite and Wealden, - is displayed a great wealth of fossil animal life. Here are new forms of Coral from the Coral-rag of Wurtemburg, and beautiful Crinoids from the Lias of Boll, and of Lyme Regis in England. A slab, about two feet square, from the latter locality, presents four or five finely preserved individuals of the genus Pentacrinites, firmly imbedded in the rock. The Cephalopods, or chambered shells, most prominent among the invertebrate forms of this period, are represented here with a great richness of genera and species. The Ammonite family here presents several hundred species, many of which, deprived of their outer shell, exhibit the beautiful, drapery-like fold-

2