362 
ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY. 
Pinos (or Isle of Pines), south of Cuba, and in the open sea 
round the coast. In 1835 a curious lizard {Amhlyrhynchus 
cristatiis) was discovered by Mr. Darwin in the Galapagos 
Islands.^ It was found to be exclusively raarine, swimming 
easily by means of its flattened tail, and subsisting chiefly on 
seaweed. One of them was sunk from the ship by a heavy 
weight, and on being drawn up after an hour was quite un¬ 
harmed. 
The families of Dinosauria, crocodiles, and Pterosauria or 
winged reptiles, are also represented in the Lias. 
Sudden Destruction of Saurians. —It has been remarked, and 
truly, that many of the fish and saurians, found fossil in the 
Lias, must have met with sudden death and immediate burial; 
and that the destructive operation, whatever may have been 
its nature, was often repeated. 
‘‘Sometimes,” says Dr. Buckland, “scarcely a single bone 
or scale has been removed from the j^lace it occupied during 
life; which could not have happened had the uncovered 
bodies of these saurians been left, even for a few hours, ex¬ 
posed to putrefaction, and to the attacks of fishes and other 
smaller animals at the bottom of the sea.”f Not only are the 
skeletons of the Ichthyosaurs entire, but sometimes the con¬ 
tents of their stomachs still remain between their ribs, as be¬ 
fore remarked, so that we can discover the particular species 
of fish on which they lived, and the form of their excrements. 
Not unfrequently there are layers of these coprolites, at dif¬ 
ferent depths in the Lias, at a distance from any entire skele¬ 
tons of the marine lizards from which they were derived; 
“as if,” says Sir H. de la Beche, “the muddy bottom of the 
sea received small sudden accessions of matter from time to 
time, covering up the coprolites and other exuviae which had 
accumulated during the intervals.”! It is further stated that, 
at Lyme Regis, those surfaces only of the coprolites which 
lay uppermost at the bottom of the sea have sutfered partial 
decay, from the action of water before they were covered and 
protected by the muddy sediment that has afterwards per¬ 
manently enveloped them. 
Numerous specimens of the Calamary or pen-and-ink fish, 
{Geoteuthis hollensis) have also been met with in the Lias at 
Lyme, Avith the ink-bags still distended, containing the ink 
in a dried state, chiefly composed of carbon, and but slight¬ 
ly impregnated with carbonate of lime. These cephalopoda, 
therefore, must, like the saurians, have been soon buried in 
* See Darwin, Naturalist’s Voyage, p. 385. Murray, 
t Bridgewater Treatise, p. 115. 
t Geological Researches, p. 334. 
