Ordeii— PTEROSAUEIA. 



PTERODACTYLES OF THE LIASSIC FORMATIONS. 



Genus — Dimorphodon, Owen. 

 Species — Dimorphodon macronyx, Bucklcmd. 



Remains of volant Reptiles {Pterosatiria) were later recognised, and, save in the 

 instance about to be recorded, in a more fragmentary or scattered condition, in England 

 than in Continental localities. 



A single bone or tooth gives value to a slab of Stonesfield Slate, and the evidence of 

 a Pterodactyle rarely goes beyond such specimen in that Oolitic deposit. A jaw with 

 teeth, or a skull more or less entire, from the Chalk of Kent, or the Upper Green-sand of 

 Cambridge, has been welcomed for the fuller information so yielded ; and such fossils, 

 with a few detached vertebrae and wing-bones, have expanded our conceptions of the 

 bulk attained by some of the Flying-dragons at the decline of the Mesozoic period. 



When the waters over which they flitted had a clayey or muddy bottom it afforded a 

 quieter resting-place to the dead body of the Pterosaurian therein entombed. So the first 

 discovered specimen of one of these in the upraised petrified ocean-bed now forming the 

 Liassic cliff's of western Dorsetshire afforded Buckland'^ subjects, in the compass of a slab 

 about a foot square, for a description and figures of the leg and wing-bones, with part of the 

 vertebral column, of the species which he called Fterodacfylus macronyx — the first 

 evidence of the genus from deposits so low, or ancient, in the Oolitic series. 



In 1858 I obtained the skull, with a few other parts of the skeleton of the same or a 

 closely allied species, from the Lower Lias at Lyme Regis, and communicated a brief 

 notice of it to the British Association, which that year met at Leeds.^ 



1 " On the Discovery of a New Species of Pterodactyle in the Lias at Lyme Regis." By the Rev. W. 

 Buckland, D.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. (Read Feb. G, 1829.) 'Transactions of the Geological Society of 

 London,' second series, 4to, vol. iii, I83.i, p. 217, pi. xxvii. 



2 "On a New Genus {Bimorphodon) of Pterosauria, with Remarks on the Geological Distribution of 

 Flying Reptiles ;" in 'Reports (Sections) of the British Association,' 18,58, p. y?. 



