186 GIGANTIC TERRESTRIAL SAUSIANS. 



cisely similar, in the principles of their construction, to the 

 teeth of the modern Iguana, as to leave no doubt of the near 

 connexion of this most gigantic extinct reptile with the 

 Iguanas of our own time. When we consider that the 

 largest living Iguana rarely exceeds five feet in length, 

 whilst the congenerous fossil animal must have been nearly 

 twelve times as long, we cannot but be impressed by the 

 discovery of a resemblance, amounting almost to identity, 

 between such characteristic organs as the teeth, in one of 

 the most enormous among the extinct reptiles of the fossil 

 world, and those of a genus whose largest species is compa- 

 ratively so diminutive. According to Cuvier, the common 

 Iguana inhabits all the warm regions of America : it lives 

 chiefly upon trees, eating fruits, and seeds, and leaves. The 

 female occasionally visits the water, for the purpose of lay- 

 ing in the sand its eggs, which arc about the size of those of 

 a pigeon.* 



As the modern Iguana is found only in the warmest re- 

 gions of the present earth, we may reasonably infer that a 



did not cease with the completion of the Wealden series. The individual 

 from which this skeleton was deiivcd liad probab'y been drifted to sea, as 

 those which afforded the bones found in the fresh-water deposites subjacent 

 to this marine formation, had been drifted into an estuary. Tiiis unique 

 skelelon is now in the museum of Mr. Mantell, and confirms nearly all his 

 conjectures respecting the many insulated bones which he had referred to 

 the Iguanodon. 



* In the Appendix to a paper in the Geol. Trans. Lnnd. (N. S. Vol. III. 

 Pt. 3) on the fossil bones of the Iguam don, found in the Isle of Wight and 

 Isle of Purbeck, I have mentioned the following facts, illustrative of the her- 

 bivorous habits of the living Iguana. 



In the spring of 1829, " Mr. VV. J. Broderip saw a living Iguana, about 

 two fi-ct long, in a hot-house at Mr. Miller's nursery gardens, near Bristol. 

 It had refused to eat insects, and other kinds of animal food, until happen- 

 ing to be near some kidney-bean plants that were in the house for forcing, 

 it began to eat of their leaves, and was from that time forth supplied from 

 these plants." In 1828, Captain Belcher found, in the inland of Jsabella, 

 swarms of Iguanas, that appeared onniivorous ; they fed voraciously on the 

 eggs of birds, and the intestines of fowls and insects. 



