298 EXTINCT MONSTERS 



geologist, Dr. G-. A. Mantell, appeared in The Illustrated London 

 News of November 4, 1848 : 



" SIR, 



" Will you allow me to correct a statement that appeared 

 in the last number of your interesting publication ? The 

 fossil mentioned at the conclusion of the admirable notice of 

 the so-called sea-serpent, as having been exhibited in America 

 under the name Hydrarchos Sillimani, was constructed by the 

 exhibitor, Koch, from bones collected in various parts of Alabama, 

 and which belonged to several individual skeletons of an extinct 

 marine cetacean, termed Basilosaurus by the American naturalists, 

 and better known in this country by that of Zeuglodon, a term 

 signifying yoked teeth. Mr. Koch is the person who, a few years 

 ago, had a fine collection of fossil bones of elephants and masto- 

 dons, out of which he made up an enormous skeleton and exhibited 

 it in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, under the name Missourium. 

 This collection was purchased by the trustees of the British 

 Museum, and from it were selected the bones which now consti- 

 tute the matchless skeleton of a mastodon in our National Gallery 

 of organic remains [then in the British Museum]. Not content 

 with the interest which the fossils he collected in various pares of 

 the United States possess, Mr. Koch, with the view of exciting 

 the curiosity of the ignorant multitude, strung together all the 

 vertebrae he could obtain of Basilosaurus, and arranged them in a 

 serpentine form, manufactured a skull and claws, and exhibited 

 the monster as a fossil sea-serpent, under the above-mentioned 

 name, Hydrarchos. But the trick was immediately exposed by 

 the American naturalists, and the true nature of the fossil bones 

 pointed out. 1 



1 After this, Koch's sea-serpeiit was carried to Dresden. 



