anatomy. It is of the Plesiosaurus, that Cuvier asserts the structure to have been the most heteroclite, and its characters altogether the most monstrous, that have been yet found amid the ruins of a former world.[1] To the head of a Lizard, it united the teeth of a Crocodile; a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent: a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale. Such are the strange combinations of form and structure in the Plesiosaurus—a genus, the remains of which, after interment for thousands of years amidst the wreck of millions of extinct inhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recalled to light by the researches of the Geologist, and submitted to our examination, in nearly as perfect a state as the bones of species that are now existing upon the earth.
The Plesiosauri appear to have lived in shallow seas and estuaries, and to have breathed air like the Ichthyosauri, and our modern Cetacea. We are already acquainted with five or six species, some of which attained a prodigious size and length; but our present observations will be chiefly limited to that which is the best known, and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, viz. the P. Dolichodeirus.[2]
- ↑ Cet habitant de l'ancien monde est peut-être la plus hétéroclite et celui de tous qui paroit le plus mériter le nom de monstre.—Oss. Foss. V. Pt. 2, p. 476.
- ↑ The first specimens of this animal were discovered in the lias of Lyme Regis, about the year 1823, and formed the foundation of that admirable paper (Geol. Trans. Lond. vol. 5, Pt. 2.) in which Mr. Conybeare and M. De la Beche established and named this genus. Other examples have since been recognised in the same formations in different parts of England, Ireland, France, and Germany, and in formation of various ages, from the muschel kalk upwards to the chalk. The first specimen discovered in a state approaching to perfection, was that in the collection of the Duke of Buckingham, (figured in the Geol. Trans. Lond. N. S. Vol. 1, Pt. 2, Pl. 48.) Another specimen, nearly entire, in the collection of the British Museum, eleven feet in length, is figured in our second volume, (Pl. 16;) and at Pi. 17, a still more perfect fossil skeleton, also in the British Museum, discovered by Mr. Hawkins, in the
