THE RESTORATION OF EXTINCT ANIMALS. 483 



circulation) were those b}^ Sir Henry Delabeche, shown on the frontis- 

 piece to the second series of Buckland\s Curiosities of Natural History, 

 depicting- a number of extinct animals, including Ichthyosaurs (fish 

 lizard) and Plesiosaurs (a reptile). This was the first attempt at restor- 

 ing these marine reptiles and it is to be noted that they are drawn 

 with round, pointed tails. A little later Owen, noticing that in every 

 skeleton of Ichthyosaur the terminal portion of the backbone was 

 bent at an angle to the rest of the vertebral column, inferred that the 

 tail was high and compressed, somewhat like that of a newt, and that 

 the bend was caused by the sagging over of the tail as decomposition 

 set in. So the next lot of restorations, including those made by Water- 

 house Hawkins for the Crystal Palace, showed these creatures with 

 flattened tails. 



Years passed on and the famous deposits at Holzmaden, Wurtem- 

 berg, yielded up some beautifully preserved examples of Ichthyosaurs, 

 which definitelv settled the question of the shape of the tail, for; pic- 

 tured on the rock by the hand of Nature was a deep, forked, vertical 

 tail, not unlike that of some sharks in appearance, but with this strik- 

 ing structural difterence that while in the tail of sharks the backbone 

 is continued along the upper edge of the tail, in the fish-lizards the 

 bone runs along the lower edge; the bend in the vertebral column was 

 not a break at all. but a perfectly natural flexure. More than this, 

 the specimens showed the presence, hitherto unsuspected, of a high 

 back fin of whose existence there is no more trace in the skeleton than 

 there is in modern whales of the presence of a similar fin. Behind 

 the well-defined fin was a series of markings apparently indii-ating an 

 irregular crest like that borne by the European Triton during the 

 breeding season, and thus was Ichthyosaurus depicted in the next series 

 of restorations. But if the first pictures had shown too little, these, 

 on the other hand, showed too much, for subsequent study made it 

 evident that the irregular markings following the back fin were acci- 

 dental and formed no part of the reptile, and so the fourth and last 

 stage of the Ichthyosaur represents an animal clearly built for speed, 

 with a powerful, vertical tail, four paddles and a high back fin. The 

 Ichthyosaurus companion in the Liassic Sea, the Plesiosaur, has also 

 passed through various stages of reconstruction, first appearing with 

 a long neck thrown into graceful, swan-like curves, the long-accepted 

 version; next that of Dames, with a comparatively inflexible neck, 

 while somewhere between the two lies the truth. For it may be taken 

 for granted that any creature with a long, slender neck is capable of 

 bending this about in search of food, even though it may not be pos- 

 sible for him to throw it into a series of graceful sigmoid curves. 

 When, in 1852, the New Crystal Palace was erected at Sydenham, 

 England, it was resolved to hnxe as one of the features of the sur- 

 rounding grounds a group of restorations of extinct animals, and Mr. 



