CHAPTER XIV 

 PARASUCHIA 



The first known specimen of the order of reptiles now generally- 

 known as the Parasuchia was found in Wiirtemberg, Germany, in 

 1826 and very briefly and inadequately described' two years later 

 by Professor George Jaeger. The specimen was a sorry one, and 

 was sadly misinterpreted by Jaeger. It consisted chiefly of casts 

 of the alveoli or sockets of a number of teeth, more or less con- 

 nected by corroded or decomposed portions of the jaws. He 

 recognized the casts as teeth of a pecuUar reptile, but mistook the 

 roots for crowns, and, naturally concluding that such obtuse teeth 

 would be of use only for the mastication of vegetable food — about 

 the last kind of food to which the phytosaurs were addicted — 

 called the animal Phytosaurus, meaning plant saurian. Because of 

 differences he observed in the shapes of the teeth he thought that 

 they belonged to two distinct species, which he called cylindri- 

 codon and cubicodon; but the differences were due simply to the 

 different positions they held in the jaws. 



Fourteen years later Hermann von Meyer, the renowned Ger- 

 man paleontologist, described and figured other remains of the 

 same or an allied reptile under the name Belodon plieningeri. In 

 subsequent papers during the next twenty-three years von Meyer 

 very fully described and beautifully illustrated the skulls and other 

 remains of this and other species, all of which he referred to the 

 genus Belodon, the name by which for many years the animals 



' "The author showed drawings and some specimens of two hitherto unknown 

 reptiles from the white, coarse-grained sandstone, of which one in the form of the skull 

 resembles the gavial, but is distinguished by the cylindrical form of the lateral teeth 

 of the jaws; he therefore calls it provisionally cylindricodon, and a second species or 

 genus, of which, however, so far only fragments of the jaws have been found, because 

 of the four-cornered form of the teeth, cubicodon, while at the same time for the genus 

 or family, to which the remains of these animals have belonged, he proposes the name 

 Phytosaurus, since the teeth seem to be more adapted to a vegetable diet, even though 

 they have not been worn away, as in Iguanodon." — Isis (1828), p. 441 (translation). 



