36 RELICS FROM THE WRECK 



allied in structure to the iguana of the West Indies ; seven- 

 ty feet in length, and fourteen and a half feet in circumfer- 

 ance round the body. A thigh bone measures three feet 

 eight inches, and thirty-five inches in circumference, and 

 the bones of the foot show it to have been six and a half 

 feet in length. The nose of the animal was armed with a 

 horn, equal in size, and resembling in form, the lesser horn 

 upon the nose of the rhinoceros, an apparatus which also 

 exists on the nose of the iguana. The teeth, some of which 

 are two and a half inches in length, are deeply serrated, and 

 their resemblance to those of the iguana, clearly demonstrate 

 that, like it, it was of herbivorous habits. Besides the re- 

 mains found in Tilgate Forest, in strata of the Wealden 

 formation, Dr. Mantell mentions the discovery of another 

 at Maidstone, in an arenaceous or sandy limestone, called 

 Kentish rag, belonging to the Shanklin sands. This rock, 

 he observes, abounds in the marine shells, which are char- 

 acteristic of that division of the chalk formation. In the 

 quarry in which the remains of this iguanodon were found, 

 Mr. Benson has discovered fossil wood by the boring shells, 

 the lithodomi ; impressions of leaves, stems of trees, ammon- 

 ites, nautili, &c., large conical striated teeth, which are re- 

 ferrible to those extinct fossil fishes which M. Agassiz de- 

 nominates sauroid, or lizard-like, scales and teeth of several 

 kinds of fishes, and among these a jaw or mandible of that 

 singular genus of fish, the Chimera. 



The geological position of this specimen forms an excep- 

 tion to what has been previously remarked of the fossils of 

 the Wealden ; for, while the bones in the latter were asso- 

 ciated with terrestrial and fluviatile remains, only the Maid- 

 stone specimen is imbedded in a marine deposit. This dis- 

 crepancy nowise affects the arguments as to the fluviatile 

 origin of the Wealden ; it merely shows that part of the 

 delta had subsided^ and was covered by the chalk ocean, 

 while the country of t/ie iguanodon was still in existence. 



