DRAGONS OF OLD TIME 155 
of the head, a position which would be convenient to an air- 
breathing animal that spent most of its time in the water. 
With regard to what may be called the architecture of this 
huge skeleton, Professor Osborn says : ‘‘ The backbone is indeed 
a marvel. The fitness of the construction consists, like that of 
the American truss-bridge, in attaining the maximum of strength 
with the minimum of weight.” 
Morosaurus is an allied form, also from the Atlantosaurus beds 
of Wyoming, with a long neck and small head. But no complete 
skeleton has yet been found. 
Unfortunately, there are at present no complete skeletons 
known of English Dinosaurs related to the American forms above 
described. But, since the English fossils were first in evidence 
by many years, and Marsh’s discoveries have confirmed in a 
remarkable way conclusions drawn by Owen, Huxley, Hulke, 
and Seeley, and others from materials that were rather frag- 
mentary, it may be worth while to give some account of these 
remains and the interpretations they have received. 
Dr. Buckland, in his Bridgewater Treatise, 1836, referred to a 
limb-bone in the Oxford Museum, from the great Oolite forma- 
tion near Woodstock, which was examined by Cuvier, and 
pronounced to have once belonged to a whale ; also a very large 
rib, which seemed whale-like. In 1838 Professor Owen, when 
collecting materials for his famous Beioort on the Fossil Reptiles 
of Great Britain, inspected this remarkable limb-bone, and 
could not match it with any bones known among the whale 
tribe; and yet its structure, where exposed, was like that of 
the long bone (humerus) of the paddle of a whale. Later on, 
he abandoned the idea that it once belonged to a whale, and it 
was thought that the extinct animal in question might have 
been a reptile of the crocodilian order. In time, a fine series 
