52 ANIMALS. OF THE PAST 
troops to select their share of the plunder, the 
artillery was not suffered to play on that part 
of the city in which the celebrated fossil was 
known to be preserved. In the meantime, the 
canon of St. Peter’s, shrewdly suspecting the 
reason why such peculiar favor was shown to 
his residence, removed the specimen and con- 
cealed it in a vault; but, when the city was 
taken, the French authorities compelled him 
to give up his ill-gotten prize, which was 
immediately transmitted “to the Jardin des 
Plantes, at Paris, where it still forms one of 
the most interesting objects in that magnifi- 
cent collection.” And there it remains to 
this day. ih 
The seas that rolled over western Kansas 
were the headquarters of the Mosasaurs, and ~ 
hundreds — aye, thousands — of specimens 
have been taken from the chalk bluffs of that 
region, some of them in such a fine state of 
preservation that we are not only well ac- 
quainted with their internal structure, but with 
their outward appearance as well. They were 
essentially swimming lizards — great, over- 
grown, and distant relatives of the Monitors 
