SECTION X.
IGUANODON.[1]
As the reptiles hitherto considered appear from their teeth to have been carnivorous, so we find extinct species of the same great family, that assumed the character and office of herbivore. For our knowledge of this genus, we are indebted to the scientific researches of Mr. Mantell. This indefatigable historian of the Wealden fresh-water formation, has not only found the remains of the Plesiosaurus, Megalosaurus, Hylæosaurus,[2] and several species of Crocodiles and Tortoises in these deposites, of a period intermediate between the oolitic and cretaceous series, but has also discovered in Tilgate Forest the remains of the Iguanodon, a reptile much more gigantic than the Megalosaurus, and which, from the character of its teeth, appears to have been herbivorous.[3] The teeth of the Iguanodon are so precisely
- ↑ See Pl. 1, Fig. 45, and Pl. 24; and Mantell's Geology of Sussex, and of the Southeast of England.
- ↑ The Hylæosaurus, or Lizard of the Weald, was discovered in Tilgate Forest, in Sussex, in 1832. This extraordinary Lizard was probably about twenty dive feet long. Its most peculiar character consists in the remains of a series of long, flat, and pointed bones, which seems to have formed an enormous dermal fringe, like the horny spines on the back of the modern Iguana. These bones vary in length from five to seventeen inches, and in width from three to seven inches and a half at the base. Together with them were found the remains of large dermal bones, or thick scales which were probably lodged in the skin.
- ↑ The Iguanodon has hitherto been found only, with one exception, in the Wealden fresh-water formation of the south of England, (Pl. 1, sec 22.) intermediate between the marine oolitic deposites of the Portland stone and those of the green-sand formation in the cretaceous series. The discovery, in 1834, (Phil. Mag. July, 1834, p. 77.) of a large proportion of the skeleton of one of these animals, in strata of the latter formation, in the quarries of Kentish Rag, near Maidstone, shows that the
