MONOGRAPH 
OF 
THE FOSSIL REPTILIA 
OF THE 
LIASSIC FORMATIONS. 
Order — PTEROSAURIA, Oioen. 
Genus — Dimorphodon, Owen. 
Species — Dimorphodon macronyx, BucJdand. 
Remains of volant Reptiles {Pterosauria) were later recognised, and, save in the 
instance about to be recorded, in a more fragmentary or scattered condition, in England 
than in Continental localities. 
A single bone or tooth gives value to a slab of Stonesfield Slate, and the evidence of 
a Pterodactyle rarely goes beyond such specimen in that Oolitic deposit. A jaw with 
teeth, or a skull more or less entire, from the Chalk of Kent, or the Upper Green-sand of 
Cambridge, has been welcomed for the fuller information so yielded ; and such fossils, 
with a few detached vertebrae and wing-bones, have expanded our conceptions of the 
bulk attained by some of the Elying-dragons at the decline of the Mesozoic period. 
When the waters over which they flitted had a clayey or muddy bottom it afforded a 
quieter resting-place to the dead body of the Pterosaurian therein entombed. So the first 
discovered specimen of one of these in the upraised petrified ocean-bed now forming the 
Liassic cliffs of western Dorsetshire afforded Buckland^ subjects, in the compass of a slab 
about a foot square, for a description and figures of the leg and wing-bones, with part of the 
1 “ On the Discovery of a New Species of Pterodactyle in the Lias at Lyme Regis.” By the Rev. W. 
Buckland, D.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. (Read Feb. 6, 1829.) ‘Transactions of the Geological Society of 
London,’ second series, 4to, vol. hi, 1835, p. 217, pi. xxvii. 
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