150 WATER REPTILES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT 



After peace was declared, one has regretfully to add that the 

 canon, not Dr. Hofmann, was reimbursed for it, or so it is said. 

 Cuvier rather naively says that it was ceded to the Garden of 

 Plants of Paris, perhaps in the way that many other things are 

 ceded to the conqueror in time of war. The specimen is really 

 a good one, even when compared with many found in recent years, 

 and there is little wonder that the cupidity of St. Fond was incited 

 by it. Casts of it are now or have been in nearly every noted 

 museum of the world, and pictures of it illustrated nearly every 

 textbook of geology published during the first three-quarters of the 

 past century. It had been the subject of considerable contro- 

 versy even before it came into the hands of Cuvier. Peter Camper 

 figured and described the skull as that of a whale or "breathing 

 fish"; while St. Fond himself later called it a crocodile. Crocodile 

 or alligator skeletons were rare in those days, and St. Fond 

 made a special trip to the British Museum to study one. But it 

 was really Adrian Camper, a son of Peter Camper, who deserves 

 the credit, so often wrongly ascribed to Cuvier, for the recognition 

 of the true nature of the fossil. He insisted that the animal was 

 a lizard allied to the living monitors, an opinion which it will 

 be seen has finally been proved to be correct within very recent 

 years. 



In 1808 this famous skull, and all other known remains of a 

 similar nature, came under the observation of Cuvier, the renowned 

 French naturalist and paleontologist, who confirmed the views of 

 Adrian Camper. He fully described and figured all the known 

 parts of the skeleton that had later come to light, calling the animal 

 the great lizard of the Meuse, the river near which Hofmann's 

 specimen was found. Conybeare, a well-known paleontologist 

 of England, some years later formally christened it Mosasaurus, 

 a transliteration of Cuvier's phrase, from the Latin Mosa, for 

 Meuse, and saurus, a lizard. For more than half a century Cuvier's 

 figure of the skull of the original specimen appeared in works 

 on geology over the name Mosasaurus hofmanni, or Mosasaurus 

 cam peri. One could wish that the former name for the species 

 might prevail, in recognition of the zealous doctor who was so 

 shabbily treated in his possession of the specimen. 



