S^ Professor Owen on British Fossil BepHUs. 



which perished in the great historical catastrophe of water, 

 and have been washed from latitudes suitable to their exist- 

 ence to more northern shores ? Are the British fossil Rep- 

 tiles actually extinct, and may not some living representatives 

 of the Labyrinthodons, Enaliosaurs, Dinosaurs, Sec, still remain 

 to be discovered, in those warmer regions where alone large 

 species of reptiles are now known to exist ? 



Such questions and explanations of the phenomena which 

 are the subject of the present report, will be most likely to 

 suggest themselves to those who are not conversant with the 

 truths of geology, and who may never have been eye wit- 

 nesses of the circumstances under which fossil bones of rep- 

 tiles are found. 



In many cases, these circumstances are so' opposed to any 

 that can be conceived to have been produced by the opera- 

 tion of a superincumbent bed of waters upon the present sur- 

 face of the earth, during a period of less than one year, that 

 the earliest observers, to whom the operations of a temporary 

 general deluge suggested the first explanation of the appear- 

 . ance of the remains of a large and strange animal, were irre- 

 sistibly led to the conviction, that the conditions under which 

 such fossil animal was found, were wholly inexplicable on the 

 supposition of its carcase having been left by the retiring 

 waters of a flood. Thus the good Quaker of Whitby, in his 

 letter to Dr Fothergill, recounting the discovery of the ex- 

 tinct species of crocodile that now bears his name (Teleosaurus 

 Chapmanni\ says : " The bones were covered five or six feet 

 with water every full sea, and were about nine or ten yards 

 from the cliff, which is nearly perpendicular, and about sixty 

 yards high, and is continually wearing away by the sea wash- 

 ing against it ; and, if I may judge by what has happened in 

 my own memory, it must have extended beyond these bones 

 less than a century ago. There are several regular strata, or 

 layers of stone, of some yards thickness, that run along the 

 cliff nearly parallel to the horizon and to one another. I 

 mention this to obviate an objection, that this animal may 

 have been upon the surface, and in a series of years may have 

 . sunk down to where it lay, which will now appear impossible, 



