Oct., 1891. 
DRAGONS OF THE PRIME. 
217 
“DRAGONS OF THE PRIME.”* 
BY A. BERNARD BADGER, B. A. 
There is nowadays no ordinarily well-informed person 
who is not aware that formerly there lived on this earth 
animals which, in the size of their bodies and limbs, and in 
the ferocity of their natures, were the equals of the most 
horrible dragons and griffins which the imagination of man 
has conceived ; in fact, the existence of creatures, some of 
which were half crocodile, half fish, others half crocodile, half 
bird, has become one of the common-places of knowledge, 
while the names of the Ichthyosaurus , Plesiosaurus, and Deino- 
saurus have become almost household words. It is of these 
“ Dragons of the prime, 
That tear each other in their slime,” 
as Tennyson says, of the Ichthyosaur, Plesiosaur, and Deino- 
saur, that I now wish to speak; you may think, therefore, 
that it is somewhat of a hackneyed subject which you are 
invited to consider. It has seemed to me, however, that 
while everyone who has studied geology, even a little, has 
heard something of these animals, yet but few have studied 
them in detail and know the real interest of their structure. 
It is my object to show that these animals are interesting, 
not so much because they are enormous in size and strange 
in appearance, and very unlike any of the creatures which we 
are accustomed to see about us, but rather on account of the 
relation of their structure either to that of other animals or 
to their mode of life. These, then, are the two points of 
view from which we will regard them :— 
Description of Figures in Plate 12. 
Fig. 1.—Ichthyosaurus restored. 
Fig. 2.—Hind-limb of Crocodile. 
Fig. 3.—Paddle of Ichthyosaurus, shewing rounded flattened charac¬ 
ter of the bones, which are enclosed in an envelope of skin. 
Fig. 4.—Skull of Ichthyosaurus : St., supra-temporal, Qj., quadrato- 
jugal, Po., post-orbital bones roofing in the infra-temporal 
fossa. Br. bony ring of eye. 
Fig. 5.—Part of lower jaw of Ichthyosaurus. 
Fig. 6.—A vertebra of Ichthyosaurus, shewing the biconcave 
vertebra. 
Fig. 7.—Plesiosaurus restored. 
Fig. 8.—Paddle of Plesiosaurus, shewing its elongated flattened bones. 
Figs. 9, 10, 11. —Diagrams to illustrate the evolution of Plesiosaurus 
(Fig. 11) from an ancestor like Dactylosaurus (Fig. 9), 
through a form like Neusticosaurus (Fig. 10). 
* The substance of a lecture delivered at the late Summer Meeting 
in Oxford of the University Extension Students. 
