Fossils

Ancestors of the newt, the polliwog, the lizard and the water-snake, thoughtless creatures that swam in the shallow seas that covered the world in time's twilight until, stranded on limacious, shelving beaches left by those waters as the sun sucked them away, they died and turned to stone . . . enormous land beasts that shouldered through the early jungles of the world or straddled, whinnying, its ice-blistered rocks -- the Dinosaurus, the Brontosaurus and the ringstreaked Lehthyornis, strange fowl: these were, last week, loaded tenderly into 40 trucks, moved into the new building of the Peabody Museum at Yale. More than 2,000 scientists have been invited for the museum's opening. Children of the State of Connecticut, school by school, will be led through for "visual instruction."