OF A FORMER WORLD. 



29 



the construction of the head was that of a lizard, with 

 enormously large eyes j the vertebras were doubly concave, 

 like those of fishes, thus combining in its osteology the con- 

 formation of the whale, the ornithorhynchus, the crocodile, 

 and a fish." 



Fig. 1. 



Ichthyosauras communis. 



Dr. Buckland in his Bridgewater Treatise mentions that 

 the skeleton of one of these animals from Lyme Regis in 

 Dorsetshire, preserved in the Oxford Musuem, contains 

 within the ribs a large mass of undigested fish scales, which 

 it had devoured previous to its death, and as this mass of 

 coprolitic matter occurs through the entire region of the 

 ribs, he concludes that like existing crocodiles, it must have 

 had a capacious stomach, whole human bodies having been 

 sometimes found in the latter. " The coprolites (dung- 

 stones) voided by Ichthyosauri, containing the bones, scales, 

 and teeth, of the animals they fed on, are found in great 

 abundance in the lias formation. At Lyme Regis, these co- 

 prolites are so abundant, that they lie in some parts of the 

 lias like potatoes scattered on the ground ; still more com- 

 mon are they in the estuary of the Severn, where they are 

 similarly disposed in strata of many miles in extent, and 

 mixed up so abundantly with teeth and rolled fragments 

 of the bones of reptiles and fishes, as to show that this re- 

 gion, having been the bottom of an ancient sea, was for a , 

 long period the receptacle of the bones and fcecal remains 

 of its inhabitants. Thus when we see the body of" an 

 Ichthyosaurus still containing the food it had eaten just 

 before its death, and its ribs still surrounding the remains 

 of fishes that were swallowed ten thousand times ten thou- 



