Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let

you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume,

take a nice deep breath in,

let it out slowly,

and off we go

Tonight's selection is a short history of the world by H.G. Wells, published by Macmillan Co. New York, 1922. Let's pick up where we left off.

Chapter 7. The first birds and the first mammals.

In a few paragraphs, a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming reptiles of that first great summer of life,

the Mesozoic period has been sketched. But while the dinosaurs

lorded it over the hot salvas and marshy plains, and the pterodactals filled the forests with their flutterings, and possibly

with shrieks and crogings as they pursued the humming insect life of the still flowerless shrubs and trees.

Some less conspicuous and less abundant forms upon the margins of this abounding life were acquiring certain powers and learning certain

lessons of endurance that were to be of the utmost value to their race when at last the smiling generosity of sun and earth began to fade.

A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles.

Small creatures of the dinosaur type

seem to have been pushed by competition

and the pursuit of their enemies

towards the alternatives of extinction or adaptation to colder conditions

in the higher hills or by the sea. Among these distressed tribes there was developed a new type of scale,

scales that were elongated into quill-like forms and that presently branched into the crude beginnings of feathers.

...