354 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



f essor Dupont, director of the museum, and again shown to be those 

 of the iguanodon. 



For the past two years the bones have been under the steady in- 

 vestigation of M. L. Dollo, a former pupil of Professor Giard, of 

 Lille, who has published four papers giving accounts of his observa- 

 tions, and is expected, when he gets through with his work, to publish 

 an exhaustive treatise on the subject. He thinks he has the skeletons, 

 or parts of them, of twenty-three individuals, two of which belong to 

 Mantell's species {Iguanodon Mantdli), and twenty-one to the species 

 Iguanodon Bernissartensis. One of the specimens has been restored 

 and mounted by M. Depauw, and set up in a glass chamber in the 

 court of the museum. It is nearly complete, only a few phalanges 

 and other minor details being wanting, while, on account of the im- 

 possibility of detaching the bones, most of them have been mounted 

 still joined to one another, and fastened to the matrix as they were 

 taken from the mine. The figure has, of course, for this reason a 

 little stiffness, but not enough to attract the attention of the merely 

 casual observer, and stands, in the natural attitude of progression of 

 the animal on land, erect on its hind-limbs, with the top of its snout 

 fourteen feet two inches from the ground, and covering, from the tip 

 of the tail to a point immediately under the tip of the snout, a length 

 of twenty-three feet nine inches. 



The iguanodon belongs to the sub-class of dinosaurians and the 

 order Ornithopoda, or bird-footed. Among the special characteristics 

 of the family of the iguanodons are a single row of teeth, three func- 

 tional digits on the foot, and two symmetrical sternal plates. The 

 last, which Professor Marsh, from his studies of specimens in the Brit- 

 ish Museum, regarded as clavicles, and traced in them a point of struct- 

 ural resemblance with birds, are declared by M. Dollo, from speci- 

 mens at Bernissart, in which they are preserved in their natural rela- 

 tions, to be sternal, while no clavicles are found. There are, how- 

 ever, says Mr. H. N. Moseley, in " Nature," abundance of other points 

 in the skeleton of the iguanodon "in which the remarkable resem- 

 blances between the Ornithopoda and birds indicated by Professor 

 Huxley, more than twelve years ago, are borne out in a most remark- 

 able manner. . . . First of all, there seems to be little doubt possible 

 that the iguanodons walked, as he pointed out, on their hind-limbs 

 erect, like birds, in somewhat the attitude of the accompanying figure 

 (see Fig. 4). Several different lines of coincidence, as M. Dollo points 

 out, tend to prove this. Firstly, the remarkable resemblances be- 

 tween the structure of the pelvis and the posterior limbs of birds, and 

 the corresponding parts in the iguanodons. The points of resem- 

 blance of the ilium and ischium, pointed out by Professor Huxley, are 

 fully confirmed by the Bernissart specimens. . . . The actual pubis 

 is very large in the iguanodon, as will be seen in the figure, and pro- 

 jects forward and outward, forming an obtuse angle with the post- 



