i6o 
THE LIVING WORLD. 
power. Of these tremendous, savage and mighty amphibians the saurians were 
most prominent, of which original species none now exist, but their bones have 
been uncovered, and such remains revealed as afford to the naturalist a means 
for determining their size, appearance and habits. 
Of the Ichthyosauri {fish lizard ) many skeletons have been found in the 
tertiary deposits of Europe, measuring as much as forty feet in length. They 
possessed characteristics peculiar alike to whales and to lizards, the marks of rep¬ 
tile being distinguishable only in the skull, eyes and backbone. It had the 
teeth of a crocodile, the head and breast of a lizard, the vertebrae of a fish 
and the. flippers of a whale. Terrible as this creature must have been, its con¬ 
gener, the plesiosaurus (nearly perfect lizard), was yet more remarkable, for to an 
PLESIOSAURUS op The prehistoric world. 
equally mammoth body it joined the long neck of a serpent, terminating in the 
head of a lizard, armed with powerful teeth. The remains of this creature are 
so abundant in England as to prove that during the secondary period it must 
have existed there in great numbers. Concerning the habits of these might}' 
animals Mangin says : 
“ It is supposed that these monstrous amphibians discharged at the Jurassic 
(middle secondary) epoch the function which nowadays devolves upon the ceta¬ 
ceans, viz., that of checking the excessive multiplication in the ocean of the mol- 
lusks and fish. The ichthyosauri were specially designed for this destruction ; 
their eyes were of extraordinary magnitude, while their powerful vision enabled 
