FLYING DRAGONS. 123 



we use the word " wing," it is not in the scientific sense that we are 

 using it, but in the popular sense, just as we might speak of the wing 

 of a bat, although the bat has no true wing. Figs. 32, 33, 34, and 35 

 will give the reader some idea of the various forms presented 

 by the skeletons of Pterodactyls, or, as some authorities call them, 

 Pterosaurians (winged lizards). Great differences of opinion 

 have existed among palseontologists as to whether they are more 

 reptilian than bird-like, or even mammalian. 



More than a hundred years ago, in 1784, Collini, who was 

 Director of the Elector-Palatine Museum at Mannheim, described 

 a skeleton which he regarded as that of an unknown marine animal. 

 It was a long-billed Pterodactyl from the famous lithographic 

 stone of Solenhofen in Bavaria. The specimen was figured in 

 the Memoirs of the Palatine Academy. Collini was able from this 

 specimen to make out the head, neck, small tail, left leg, and two 

 arms ; but beyond that, he was at a loss. His conclusion was that 

 the skeleton belonged neither to a bat nor to a bird, and he 

 inquired whether it might not be an amphibian. 



In 1809 this specimen came into Cuvier's hands, who at once 

 perceived that it belonged to a reptile that could fly, and it was 

 he who proposed the name Pterodactyl. Until the oracle at 

 Paris was consulted, the greatest uncertainty prevailed, one 

 naturalist regarding it as a bird, another as a bat. Cuvier, with 

 his penetrating eye and patient investigation, combated these 

 theories, supported though they were by weighty authorities. 

 The principal key by means of which he solved the problem, 

 and detected the saurian relationship of the Pterodactyl, seems to 

 have been a certain bone belonging to the skull, known as the 

 quadrate bone. In his great work, Ossemens Fossiles^ he says, 

 " Behold an animal which, in its osteology, from its teeth to the 

 end of its claws, offers all the characters of the saurians. . . . 

 But it was, at the same time, an animal provided with the means 

 of flight which, when stationary, could not have made much use 

 of its anterior extremities, even if it did not keep them always 



