158 MARINE SAURIANS. 



anatomy. It is of the Plesiosaurus, that Cuvier asserts the 

 structure to have been the most heterocUte, and its charac- 

 ters altogether the most monstrous, that have been yet found 

 amid the ruins of a former world.* To the head of a 

 Lizard, it united the teeth of a Crocodile ; a neck of enor- 

 mous length, resembling the body of a Serpent: a trunk 

 and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, 

 the ribs of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale. Such 

 are the strange combinations of form and structure in the 

 Plesiosaurus — a genus, the remains of which, after inter- 

 ment for thousands of years amidst the wreck of millions of 

 extinct inhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recall- 

 ed to hght by the reseaches of the Geologist, and submitted 

 to our examination, in nearly as perfect a state as the bones 

 of species that are now existing upon the earth. 



The Plesiosauri appear to have lived in shallow seas and 

 estuaries, and to have breathed air hke the Ichthyosauri, and 

 our modern Cetacea. We are already acquainted with five 

 or six species, some of which attained a prodigious size and 

 length ; but our present observations will be chiefly limited 

 to that which is the best known, and perhaps the most re- 

 markable of them all, viz, the P. DoUchodeirus.f 



* Get habitant de I'ancien monde est peut-etre la plus hel6roclite et cclui 

 de tous qui paroit !e plus ineriter le nom de monstre. — Oss. Foss. V. Pt. 2, 

 p. 476. 



t The first specimens of this animal were discovered in the lias of 

 Lyme Regis, about the year 1823, and formed the foundation of that 

 admirable paper (Geol. Trans. Lend. vol. 5, Pt. 2.) in which Mr. Cony- 

 beare and M. De la Beche established and named this genus. Other ex- 

 amples have since been recognised in the same formations in different 

 parts of England, Ireland, France, nnd Germany, and in formations of 

 various ages, from the muschel kaik upwards to the chalk. The first 

 specimen discovered in a state approaching to perfection, was that in the 

 collection of the Duke of Buckingham, (figured in the Geol. Trans. 

 Lond. N. S. Vol. 1, Pt. 2, PI. 48.) Another specimen, nearly entire, in 

 the collection of the British Museum, eleven feet in length, is figured in 

 our second volume, PI. 16;) and at PI. 17, a still more perfect fossil 

 skeleton, also in the British Museum, discovered by Mr. Hawkins, in the 



