i 



Ixii PEOCEEDINGS, 



Bye Meeting, 27Tn Apeil, 1895. 

 NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON. 



The Members were received in the Great Hall by Sir William 

 Plower, the Director of the Museum, and were then conducted 

 through the galleries devoted to the collection of fossil Vertebrata 

 by Dr. Henry Woodward, Director of the Geological Department, 

 who drew special attention to the great cast of the iguanodon's 

 skeleton which has recently been set up. The iguanodon, he said, 

 was a huge lizard -like reptile which flourished in the Secondary 

 period. It stood nearly twenty feet high as it hopped or waddled 

 along, kangaroo-fashion, on its hind-legs, while the thumbs of its 

 short fore-limbs were each furnished with a nail, spur, or spine, 

 a foot long. In spite of this formidable armature and its vast 

 bulk, it was not a beast of prey, but a harmless vegetable-feeder, 

 while its feet, ankles, pelvis, and in fact its whole organization, 

 are remarkably bird-like in structure and aiTangement. The 

 great difficulties to be encountered in obtaining the skeletons 

 of these enormous fossils were mentioned by Dr. Woodward, who 

 stated that the fossil skeletons of these iguanodons were found 

 at a depth of one thousand feet from the surface of the ground 

 in a coal-mine in Belgium, and two years were spent in bringing 

 them to the light of day ; a cast of one of the skeletons was 

 taken at great expense by the authorities of one of the American 

 museums; and for a replica of this cast the British Government 

 gave in exchange a mammoth with tusks eleven feet long, a mega- 

 therium (the great extinct sloth), and a mastodon, which were 

 worth together some thousands of pounds. 



In connection with this subject it was then pointed out by 

 Mr. Arthur Stradling, the conductor of this meeting, how a 

 scientific discovery may affect the monetary value of a fossil or a 

 fossil-impression. Certain fossilized tridactylous footprints in the 

 Connecticut Red Sandstone, had, he said, until a short time ago, been 

 accepted as those of some gigantic bird. The creature, whatever it 

 was, had evidently walked across soft mud which had subsequently 

 hardened into stone without being disturbed, for on some of the 

 slabs were the pits produced by the rain-drops of a shower which 

 was falling at the time. But the geological formation in which 

 these footprints were found was long antecedent to that which had 

 hitherto been considered to be coincident with the earliest appear- 

 ance of birds, even in the early stage of their evolution when they 

 were tooth-bearing and featherless. Much discussion naturally 

 arose from this, and the square half-yards of stone so impressed 

 had found eager purchasers at the rate of 200 guineas per footstep. 

 It had, however, now been shown that this great three-toed, 

 bird-footed lizard of the Belgian coal-mine — the iguanodon which 

 Dr. Woodward had just described — belonged to a race which must 

 at one time have reigned as the dominant type over almost the 

 whole surface of the earth, and in its bipedal Avalk must have left 



