CHAPTER VI 



SAUROPTERYGIA 



Very scanty are the early human records of those strange 

 reptiles known as the plesiosaurs. Were one to search through the 

 many works published during the latter half of the seventeenth 

 century and all of the eighteenth, devoted to "lapides petrifacti," 

 "figured stones," "reliquia diluvii," or by whatever other fanciful 

 names fossils were known, here and there he would probably find 

 descriptions and figures of bones of these reptiles. It would hardly 

 seem that plesiosaurian bones could have been overlooked by the 

 curious, so abundant are they in many places. But there is no 

 such history of the early discovery of the plesiosaurs as there is of 

 the ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs. Their birth into human history 

 was very formal and proper, under the ministrations of a learned 

 doctor of science, the renowned Conybeare, of whom we shall 

 speak again. It was he, who with De la Beche, late Director of 

 the British Geological Survey, described for the first time, in 1823, 

 one of these reptiles, to which he gave the name Plesiosaurus, 

 meaning "like a lizard." He distinguished the plesiosaurs from 

 ichthyosaurs, with which it is possible that they had previously 

 been confounded, and gave a good description of considerable 

 material. Cuvier, a little later, gave a more complete description 

 of the same remains which had served Conybeare and De la Beche 

 for their original description, and for the first time made it evident 

 that fossil plesiosaurs were widely and abundantly distributed 

 over the earth. The closing sentence of Cuvier's chapter devoted 

 to the discussion of these creatures in his Ossemens Fossiles was 

 really prophetic, not only of the many discoveries of the plesiosaurs 

 yet to be made, but of all other extinct animals as well: "I doubt 

 not that, in a few years it may be, I shall be compelled to say that 

 the work which I have today finished, and to which I have given 

 so much labor is but the first glimspe of the immense creations of 

 ancient times." 



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