90 SAURIAN BIPEDS 



to the gentle movement of the Wealden river, hardly 

 a bone was missing in some of the skeletons. A cast of 

 a complete skeleton has been set up in our own 

 museum at South Kensington. All the specimens 

 recovered from the Bernissart pits are those of adults, 

 some of them attaining the length of thirty-four feet 

 from nose to tail-tip. 



A group of these, occupying the centre of a large 

 room in the Brussels Museum, gives a startling im- 

 pression of the scale of the Wealden fauna. But what 

 impresses the imagination most forcibly is that these 

 animals are supported entirely on their hind legs. One 

 asks at once what reason there can be for assuming 

 them to have been bipeds. Apparently the answer to 

 this question ought to be convincing. While the fore- 

 feet have five fingers, the hind-feet have but three toes, 

 and the footprints, of which abundance has been pre- 

 served, are exclusively three-toed impressions. With 

 the occurrence of these -in British beds geologists have 

 been long familiar, though at one time their origin was 

 attributed to a large bird. But the mystery is solved 

 by the discovery of the real authors of them. The 

 iguanodon, then, was an enormous saurian, walking 

 as nearly erect as was possible for an animal which 

 had to carry a huge tail clear of the ground, and with 

 its anterior limbs, relieved from the functions of loco- 

 motion and support, free for the use of the five-fingered 

 hands at the end of them. 



Here, then, is very nearly the fulfilment of the erect 

 attitude and freedom of the anterior limbs postulated by 



