FLYING DRAGONS. 
323 
we use the word “ wing,” it is not in the scientific sense that we are 
using it, but in the popular sense, just as we might speak of the wing 
of a bat, although the bat has no true wing. Figs. 32, 33, 34, and 35 
will give the reader some idea of the various forms presented 
by the skeletons of Pterodactyls, or, as some authorities call them, 
Pterosaurians (winged lizards). Great differences of opinion 
have existed among palaeontologists as to whether they are more 
reptilian than bird-like, or even mammalian. 
More than a hundred years ago, in 1784, Collini, who was 
Director of the Elector-Palatine Museum at Mannheim, described 
a skeleton which he regarded as that of an unknown marine animal. 
It was a long-billed Pterodactyl from the famous lithographic 
stone of Solenhofen in Bavaria. The specimen was figured in 
the Memoirs of the Palatine Academy. Collini was able from this 
specimen to make out the head, neck, small tail, left leg, and two 
arms ; but beyond that, he was at a loss. His conclusion was that 
the skeleton belonged neither to a bat nor to a bird, and he 
inquired whether it might not be an amphibian. 
In 1809 this specimen came into Cuvier’s hands, who at once 
perceived that it belonged to a reptile that could fly, and it was 
he who proposed the name Pterodactyl. Until the oracle at 
Paris was consulted, the greatest uncertainty prevailed, one 
naturalist regarding it as a bird, another as a bat. Cuvier, with 
his penetrating eye and patient investigation, combated these 
theories, supported though they were by weighty authorities. 
The principal key by means of which he solved the problem, 
and detected the saurian relationship of the Pterodactyl, seems to 
have been a certain bone belonging to the skull, known as the 
quadrate bone. In his great work, Ossemens Fossiles^ he says, 
“ Behold an animal which, in its osteology, from its teeth to the 
end of its claws, offers all the characters of the saurians. . . . 
But it was, at the same time, an animal provided with the means 
of flight — which, when stationary, could not have made much use 
of its anterior extremities, even if it did not keep them always 
