THE DINOSAUR! A. 
45 
The great merit of Mantel]/ s discoveries is not easily under- 
valued, when the large collections which he formed are studied 
in the British Museum ; and the many memoirs in which he 
made their structures known enunciate conclusions which 
Professor Owen in most cases adopted when afterwards describ- 
ing the Fossil fteptilia of Britain. 
Mantell, however, affiliated the animals which he found to 
the Saurians, for in those days the order Sauria was often used 
to comprise both Lizards and Crocodiles, so that a blending of the 
characters of bones from both these groups of animals appeared in 
no way unnatural. But, probably, Cuvier’s suggestion concern- 
ing the resemblance of the teeth of Iguanodon to the teeth of the 
living Iguana, and the knowledge that teeth among the higher 
group of mammals often furnish unfailing evidence of the skeletal 
characters of the animals to which they belong, especially 
influenced Mantell in regarding these fossil Saurians as little 
more than gigantic fossil Lizards. The wealth of materials 
furnished by the English strata for a long time drew to their 
study some of our ablest anatomists ; but it was not till 1859 
that Professor Owen proposed to separate them from Lizards, 
and instituted the order Dinosauria, which was chiefly defined 
by having more than two vertebrae in the sacrum. The Dino- 
sauria are nothing more than Yon Meyer’s Paehypoda under 
a new name. Professor Owen, however, was hindered from 
fully appreciating the true nature and structure of these 
extinct animals by a few identifications of parts of the skeleton 
which have since been better elucidated. Thus, the animals 
were at first supposed to have long clavicles somewhat like 
those of Lizards, and the coracoid was also supposed to be 
in the main like that of a Lizard. The bones of the hind 
limb and pelvis were imperfectly known or understood ; 
and it was not until Professor Cope, aided by beautiful 
specimens from the Greensand of New Jersey, studied the 
anatomy of Dinosaurs, that it began to be understood that 
many of the Dinosaurs had a kangaroo-like form, and that 
bones which were referred to the arch for the support of 
the fore-limb really belonged to the arch for the support of 
the hind-limb. Shortly afterwards Professor Huxley, in 
1868, independently came to conclusions almost identical with 
those of Professor Cope ; and, aided by the material dis- 
covered by Professor Phillips in the Forest-Marble near 
Oxford, was able to demonstrate that the supposed coracoid was 
the ilium, and the supposed clavicle was the ischium. There 
exists fortunately in the Oxford Museum a cast of the 
tibia and astragalus of Poecilopleuron ; and the character 
shown by these remains demonstrates that in this part of the 
skeleton Dinosaurs present the closest possible resemblance 
