ae tio HARVARD UNIVERSITY eu WE LIBRARY OF THE MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY GIFT OF Marvartl (stleg Absany C This book was stolen from Harvard College Library. It was later recovered. The thief was sentenced to two years at hard labor. 1932 =i ry i if KA te all i: 6 Menai N 4 r es ro oy hen hotel er lapse) bul ; \ SXTINCT MONSTERS, | 1000 copies printed September, 1892. GO; ,, Lebruary, 1893. £500) .; » New Edition, corrected and entarged, April, 1893. *y90} Sze ynoqe YyISua'yT ‘1X ALvIg "SOSUOUd SAOLVUADIAL SYNVSONIG GUNYOH DILNVOID V EATINGT MONSTERS. A POPULAR ACCOUNT OF SOME OF THE LARGER FORMS OF ANCIENT ANIMAL LIFE. BY REV. Ef WN. HUTCHINSON, Be. F.GS., s AUTHOR OF ‘‘ THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE EARTH,” AND ‘‘ THE STORY OF THE HILLS.” WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. SMIT AND OTHERS. FOURTH AND CHEAPER EDITION. LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD. 1896. Ali rights reserved. rye =, ar iid al sa ‘‘The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for Nature to realise.”— AGASSIZ, Pee EACE BY. DR. HENRY WOODWARD, F_R.S: KEEPER OF GEOLOGY, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. I HAVE been requested by my friend Mr. Hutchinson, to express my opinion upon the series of drawings which have been prepared by that excellent artist of animals, Mr. Smit, for this little book entitled “ Extinct Monsters.” Many of the stories told in early days, of Giants and Dragons, may have originated in the discovery of the limb- bones of the Mammoth, the Rhinoceros, or other large animals, in caves, associated with heaps of broken frag- ments, in which latter the ignorant peasant saw in fancy the remains of the victims devoured at the monster’s repasts. In Louis Figuier’s World before the Deluge we are favoured with several highly sensational views of extinct monsters; whilst the pen of Dr. Kinns has furnished valuable information as to the “slimy” nature of their blood! The late Mr. G. Waterhouse Hawkins (formerly a litho- graphic artist) was for years occupied in unauthorised restorations of various Secondary reptiles and Tertiary mammals, and about 1853 he received encouragement Vl PREFACE BY DR. HENRY WOODWARe. from Professor Owen to undertake the restorations of extinct animals which still adorn the lower grounds of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. But the discoveries of later years have shown that the Dicynodon and Labyrinthodon, instead of being toad-like in form, were lacertilian or salamander-like reptiles, with elongated bodies and moderately long tails; that the Iguanodon did not usually stand upon “all-fours,” but more frequently sat up like some huge kangaroo with short fore limbs; that the horn on its snout was really on its wrist ; that the Megalosaurus, with a more slender form of skeleton, had a somewhat similar erect attitude, and the habit, perhaps, of springing upon its prey, holding it with its powerful clawed hands, and tearing it with its formidable carnivorous teeth. Although the Bernissart Iguanodon has been to us a complete revelation of what a Dinosaur really looked like, it is to America, and chiefly to the discoveries of Marsh, that we owe the knowledge of a whole series of new reptiles and mammals, many of which will be found illustrated within these pages. Of long and short-tailed Pterodactyles we now know almost complete skeletons and details of their patagia or flying membranes. The discovery of the long-tailed feathered bird with teeth—the Archzopteryx, from the Oolite of Solenhofen, is another marvellous addition to our knowledge ; whilst Marsh’s great Hesperornis, a wing- less diving bird with teeth, and his flying toothed bird, the Ichthyornis dispar, are to us equally surprising. Certainly, both in singular forms of fossil reptilia and in early mammals, North America carries off the palm. Of these the most remarkable are Marsh’s Stegosaurus, PREFACE BY DR. HENRY WOODWARD. vii a huge torpid reptile, with very small head and teeth, about twenty feet in length, and having a series of flattened dorsal spines, nearly a yard in height, fixed upon the median line of its back; and his Triceratops, another reptile bigger than Stegosaurus, having a huge neck-shield joined to its skull, and horns on its head and snout. Nor do the Eocene mammals fall short of the marvellous, for in Dinoceras we find a beast with six horns, and sword- bayonet tusks, joined to a skeleton like an elephant. Latest amongst the marvels in modern paleontological discovery has been that made by Professor Fraas of the outline of the skin and fins in Ichthyosaurus tenuirostris, which shows it to have been a veritable shark-like reptile, with a high dorsal fin and broad fish-tail, so that “ fish- lizard” is more than ever an appropriate term for these old Liassic marine reptiles. As every paleontologist is well aware, restorations are ever liable to emendation, and that the present and latest book of extinct monsters will certainly prove no exception to the rule is beyond a doubt, but the author deserves our praise for the very boldness of his attempt, and the honesty with which he has tried to follow nature and avoid exaggeration. Every one will admire the simple and un- affected style in which the author has endeavoured to tell his story, avoiding, as far as possible, all scientific terms, so as to bring it within the intelligence of the unlearned. He has, moreover, taken infinite pains to study up his subject with care, and to consult all the literature bearing upon it. He has thus been enabled to convey accurate information in a simple and pleasing form, and to guide the artist in his difficult task with much wisdom and intelligence. That the excellence of the sketches is b viii PREFACE BY DR. HENRY WOODWARD. due to the artist, Mr. Smit, is a matter of course, and so is the blame, where criticism is legitimate ; and no one is more sensible of the difficulties of the task than Mr. Smit himself, Speaking for myself, I am very well pleased with the series of sketches ; and I may say so with the greater ease and freedom from responsibility, as I have had very little to. do with them, save in one or two trifling matters of criticism. I may venture, however, to commend them to my friends among the public at large as the happiest set of restorations that has yet appeared. H. W. Sg THE LATE SIR RICHARD OWEN AND A SKELETON OF DINORNIS MAXIMUS. PLATE XXIV. (From a photograph.) AU TELS 2Piee AC 7. NATURAL history is deservedly a popular subject. The manifestations of life in all its varied forms is a theme that has never failed to attract all who are not destitute of intelligence. From the days of the primitive cave- dwellers of Europe, who lived with mammoths and other animals now lost to the world; of the ancient Egyptians, who drew and painted on the walls of their magnificent tombs the creatures inhabiting the delta of the Nile; of the Greeks, looking out on the world with their bright and child-like curiosity, down to our own times, this old, yet ever new, theme has never failed. Never before was there such a profusion of books describing the various forms of life inhabiting the different countries of the globe, or the rivers, lakes, and seas that diversify its scenery: Popular writers have done good service in making the way plain for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the structures, habits, and histories of living animals; while for students a still greater supply of excellent manuals and text-books has been, and still continues to be, forthcoming. But in our admiration for the present we forget the great past. How seldom do we think of that innumerable x AUTHOR'S PRELACE. host of creatures that once trod this earth! How little in comparison has been done for them / Our natural-history books deal only with those that are alive now. Few popular writers have attempted to depict, as on a canvas, the great earth-drama that has, from age to age, been enacted on the terrestrial stage, of which we behold the latest, but probably not the closing scenes. When our poet wrote “ All the world’s a stage,” he thought only of “men and women,” whom he called “merely players,” but the geologist sees a wider applica- tion of these words, as he reviews the drama of past life on the globe, and finds that animals, too, have had “their exits and their entrances;” nay more, “the strange eventful history” of a human life, sketched by the master- hand, might well be chosen to illustrate the birth and growth of the tree of life, the development of which we shall briefly trace from time to time, as we proceed on our survey of the larger and more wonderful animals of life that flourished in bygone times. We might even make out a “seven ages” of the world, in each of which some peculiar form of life stood out prominently, but such a scheme would be artificial. There is a wealth of material for reconstructing the past that is simply bewildering ; and yet little has been done to bring before the public the strange creatures that have perished." To the writer it is a matter of astonishment that the 1 Figuier’s World before the Deluge is hardly a trustworthy book, and is often not up to date. The restorations also are misleading. Professor Dawson’s Story of the Earth and Man is better; but the illustrations are poor. Nicholson’s L2/e-History of the Earth isastudent’s book. Messrs. Cassells’ Our Earth and its Story deals with the whole of geology, and so is too diffusive ; its ideal landscapes and restorations leave much to be desired. | AUTHOR S PREFACE. x1 discoveries of Marsh, Cope, Leidy, ane) OLhers, in America, not to mention some important European discoveries, should have attracted so little notice in this country. In the far and wild West a host of strange reptiles and quad- rupeds have been unearthed from their rocky sepulchres, often of incredibly huge proportions, and, in many cases, more weird and strange than the imagination could con- ceive ;i' and yet. the :public’i have never) heard: of these discoveries, by the side of which the now well-known “lost creations” of Cuvier, Buckland, or Conybeare sink into the shade. For once, we beg leave to suggest, the hunery pressman, seeking “copy,” has failed to see a good thing. Descriptions of some of “ Marsh’s monsters” and how they were found, might, one would think, have proved attractive to a public ever on the look out for something new. Professor Huxley, comparing our present knowledge of the mammals of the Tertiary era with that of 1859, states that the discoveries of Gaudry, Marsh, and Filhol, are “as if zoologists were to become acquainted with a country hitherto unknown, as rich in novel forms of life as Brazil or South America once were to Europeans.” The object of this book is to describe some of the larger and more monstrous forms of the past—the lost creations of the old world ; to clothe their dry bones with flesh, and suggest for them backgrounds such as are indicated by the discoveries of geology: in other words, to endeavour, by means of pen and pencil, to bring them back to life. The ordinary public cannot learn much by merely gazing at skeletons set up in museums. One longs to cover their nakedness with flesh and skin, and to see them as they were when they walked this earth. xl AUTHOR’S PREFACE. Our present imperfect knowledge renders it difficult in some cases to construct successful restorations ; but, never- theless, the attempt is worth making: and if some who think geology a very dry subject, can be converted to a different opinion on reading these pages, we shall be well rewarded for our trouble. We venture to hope that those who will take the trouble to peruse this book, or even to look at its pictures, on which much labour and thought have been expended, will find pleasure in visiting the splendid geological collection at Cromwell Road. We have often watched visitors walk- ing somewhat aimlessly among those relics of a former world, and wished that we could be of some service. But, if this little book should help them the better to understand what they see there, our wish will be accomplished. Another object which the writer has kept in view is to connect the past with the present. It cannot be too strongly urged that the best commentary on the dead past is the living present. It is unfortunate that there is still too great a tendency to separate, as by a great gulf, the dead from the living, the past from the present, forms of life. The result of this is seen in our museums. Fossils have too often been left to the attention of geologists not always well acquainted with the structures of living animals. The more frequent introduction of fossil specimens side by side with modern forms of life would not only be a gain to the progress and spread of geological science, but would be a great help to students of anatomy and natural history. The tree of life is but a mutilated thing, and half its interest is gone, when the dead branches are lopped off. It is, perhaps, justifiable to give to the term “ monster” a somewhat extended meaning. The writer has therefore AUTHOR’S PREFACE. Xill included in his menagerie of extinct animals one or two creatures which, though not of any great size, are neverthe- less remarkable in various ways—such, for instance, as the winged reptiles, and anomalous birds with teeth, of later times, and others. Compared with living forms, these creatures appear to us as “monstrosities,” and may well find a place in our collection. The author wishes, in a few words, to thank those friends who have rendered him assistance in his task. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., Keeper of Geology, Natural History Museum, has from the first taken a lively interest in this little book. He kindly helped the author with his advice on difficult matters, criticising some of the artist’s preliminary sketches and suggesting improvements in the restorations. With unfailing courtesy he has ever been willing, in spite of many demands on his time, to place his knowledge at the disposal of both the author and artist ; and in this way certain errors have been avoided. Besides this, he took the trouble to read through the proof- sheets, and made suggestions and corrections which have greatly improved the text. For all this welcome aid the author begs to return his sincere thanks. To Mr. Smith Woodward, of the Natural Finer Museum, the author is also much indebted for his kindness in reading through the text and giving valuable informa- tion with regard to the latest discoveries. The artist, Mr. Smit, notwithstanding the novelty of the subject and the difficulties of the task, has thrown himself heartily into the work of making the twenty-four restorations of extinct animals. To him, also, the author is greatly indebted, and considers himself fortunate in having secured the services of so excellent an artist. X1¥ AUTHOR'S PREPACE. To the publishers his thanks are due for their liberality in the matter of illustrations, and the readiness with which they have responded to suggestions. With regard to minor illustrations the following acknow- ledgments are due :— To the Paleontological Society of Great Britain for permission to reproduce three of the illustrations in Sir Richard Owen’s great work, British Fossil Reptiles, pub- lished in their yearly volumes, viz. Figs. 3, 4, and 8. To Messrs. Bell and Co. for the following cuts from the late Dr. Gideon A. Mantell’s works: viz. Figs. 12, 14 20, 33, 37, 38. To Messrs. A. and C. Black for the following cuts from Owen’s Paleontology: viz. Figs. 51, 54, 56, 57. ’ Appendix IV. contains a list of some of the works of which the writer has made use; but it would be impossible within reasonable limits to enumerate all the separate papers which have necessarily been consulted. The reader will find numerous references, such as “ Case Y on Plan,” in brackets; these refer to the plan given at the end of the excellent little Guide to the Exhibition Galleries in the Department of Geology and Palaeontology in the Natural Ffistory Museum, Cromwell Road (price one shilling), which visitors to the Museum are advised to obtain. PREFACE FO SECOND EDITION, KS THE appearance of a second edition affords the author a pleasant opportunity of thanking the reading public, and the Press, for the kind way in which his endeavour to popularise the results of modern Paleontology has been received. There seem to be fashions in all things—even in sciences ; and perhaps the wonderful advances we have witnessed of late years in the physical sciences on the one hand, and in biological sciences on the other, may have tended to throw Paleontology somewhat into the shade. Let us hope that it will not remain there long. A large number of illustrations have been added for the present edition, besides additional matter here and there in the text. Three of the plates (viz. Plates I]. X. XV.) have been redrawn. Plate II. shows the Ichthyosaurus as interpreted by the latest discovery from Wiirtemburg. Plate X. gives a somewhat different interpretation of the Stegosaurus, suggested by some remarks of Mr. Lydekker. A slight change will be noticed in Piate XV. (Brontops). Plate XVII. is a great improvement on the old drawing (Fig. 28, old edition) of the Megatherium skeleton. Plate XXIV., besides containing a valuable portrait of the late Sir Richard Owen, gives another drawing of the Dinornis skeleton. Abril, 1893. CONTENTS. OO PAGE PREFACE BY Dr. HENRY WOODWARD ...-- e e« atk Vv POMeEHORS. PREFACE 4 4 Jt.) «= “So 2) ER se) tee ey ce Se ee 1x PEERAGE TO. SECOND: EDITION 5 °°. (4 Soo eee oe ee OXY. PMEROMUCEION 6 us 2. as) 8 © Sel OR ee eee em rat Pome I CHAP PER. Ic How ExTINcT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED .~. 2. «© e« «© © « e 9 CHAPTER Tk SMEG TOMS an a. lucy epee, fier) paws aieea se sf, Sy haere arewees 24 CHAPTER III. Peo EAE FISH-LIZARDS!. 0 a @) 3 “« a © s ef ef Usilec = “34 CHAPTER IV: THE GREAT SEA-LIZARDS AND THEIR ALLIES . . 26 »« « e« « 52 CHAPTER Y¥, Er DRAGONS OF OLD’ TIME—-DINOSAURS: .. «36 2 © « «© « 61 GHAPTEROVE PHM RAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS . «2 « « « * - 5 CLAP TER WEE. (aEmMAcONS OF OLD LIME—DINOSAURS’'s <. 2. = = « « -« 98 CHAPTER. VUE [Rie IDV AGORIS. 4 one he RR ee ae oe | XVili CONTENTS. GHAPTER * 2X: PAGE SEDER ENTS iS oy epee ig a eg: Es ge) 133 CHAPTER. 2 SOME AMERICAN MONSTERS . . . »« &© «© © a 6 . 54s CHAPTER. Xe DOME INDIAN MONSTERS‘ .~ . -<'.54-« “« o oy eee CHAPTER: GIANT SLOTHS AND ARMADILLOS. « «|... «© «| a = ne CHAPTER. XIItL rr MAMMOTH .. << . so Bubewe oo... * « = 192 CHAPTER XIV. THE MASTODON AND THE WOOLLY RHINOCEROS . . . . . «© 217 CHAPTER LX: GiANT GIRDS (, 6 0) es ce VE REIS, ous ee es ee CHAPTER XVI. THE GREAT IRISH DEER AND STELLER’S SEA-COW . . . . « 240 APPENDICES. i TARLE OF STRATIFIED, ROCKS Bimal 2s. & =. ivxaeeee 251 of—Tue GREAT SEA-SERPENT~ 6 dye a PTERODACTYLS—LONG-NECKED SEA-LIZARD—CUTTLE-FISH ORMBRERNMINEDES 2 cf lai). és = oo x ch rap ste A GIGANTIC DINOSAUR, BRONTOSAURUS EXCELSUS iia THIGH-BONE OF THE LARGEST OF THE DINOSAURS, ATLAN- TOSAURUS s es es es . s . . . se e s es . A CARNIVOROUS DINOSAUR, MEGALOSAURUS BUCKLANDI . A GIGANTIC DINOSAUR, IGUANODON BERNISSARTENSIS. . A GIGANTIC DINOSAUR, IGUANODON MANTELLI . . . AN ARMOURED -DINOSAUR, SCELIDOSAURUS HARRISONI . A GIGANTIC ARMOURED DINOSAUR, STEGOSAURUS UN- GULATUSS cheese id, Cay 32 Ln OOO Ss a GROUP OF SMALL FLYING DRAGONS, OR PTERODACTYLS . GROUP OF SEA-SERPENTS, ELASMOSAUR, AND FISHES. . A LARGE EXTINCT MAMMAL, TINOCERAS INGENS . . A Huce Extinct MAMMAL, BRONTOPS ROBUSTUS. . . A GIGANTIC HooreD Mammat, SIVATHERIUM GIGAN- SKELETON OF GREAT GROUND SLOTH OF SOUTH AMERICA GREAT GROUND SLOTH OF SOUTH AMERICA, MEGATHERIUM SURE SEINE a ee com a) # foe) ee mw! a 1x 25 41 55 69 71 79 OF IOI 105 113 131 I4I I51 161 169 179 181 LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE A GIGANTIC ARMADILLO, GLYPTODON ASPER . . . . I189 THE MAMMOTH, ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS . . - . % |=eGG THE MASTODON OF OHIO, M. AMERICANUS . « « « wi THE WOOLLY RHINOCEROS, RHINOCEROS TICHORHINUS . 225 WLOA"BIRDS) (5 oe se ee me te OS THE GREAT IRISH DEER, CERVUS MEGACEROS . . . « 243 SLELLER S' SEA-COW, RHYTINA GIGAS, .* 1.) 3) ese eee #39) EIST OF FIGURES Chae TEX oe FIG. PAGE I. PTERYGOTUS ANGLICUS . . Seen carat Terenas a re a a 5 | 20 PE OTLURIAN MEROSEOMATEA, - 2 |<; (la. iss lentes (pout an oeaaeee baton’, (130 a LEH THVOSAURUS, INTERMEDIUS s- o AS 8. aly penny, 9 Been, OF. ICHEMVOSAURE» & ai ZO 14. PORTION OF A SLAB OF NEW RED SANDSTONE . . . . - 80 Sta PORBION OF A SLAB WITH DRACKS! ie) 1 <\la¢ 1G elo i) St HOE WM ENEE-BOMWRS: OF AL ROSAURUS 4) Wal fe Se ei 8B BRC OMUbEN Or CERAPOSAURUSIS il) a) Lo wes pik hee SOs) ek (he 8a 16. SEULE OF ‘(CERATOSAURUS NASICORNIS 6 5. | 2 25s «| 85 19. SKELETON OF COMPSOGNATHUS LONGIPES . . . . . . . 86 2o. VOOMH OF AGUANODON % = hdl eGR a Yee ys aM ee 21. SKELETON OF IGUANODON BERNISSARTENSIS . . . «. « « I00 22. SKULL AND SKELETON OF IGUANODON MANTELLI . . . . IOI 23. TRACKS OF IGUANODON FP aie Mee MOMMA AAC etn eh dla RC BO 24. RESTORED SKELETON OF SCELIDOSAURUS HARRISONI . . . 105 25. SKELETON OF STEGOSAURUS UNGULATUS . - + + + « « II2 26, WA VERTEBR@ OF STEGOSAURUS . < « - + + + 2 ,« IG 27. LIMB-BONES OF STEGOSAURUS. -. . - + + + + + + «+ Ti4 oho Ei AES@OLe SERGOSAIIRUS) (2 fo & ss « fa ye 3 Se ee 6 ORES “ xxl LISD (Or LIGOKLES IN TEXT, FIG. : PAGE 29, HIPAD OF TRICERATOPS « 4 5 % 6 « 35 6 » «| 30; SKELETON OF TRICERATOPS PRORSUS . .- s «© + «+ « [nem 31. BoNy SPINES BELONGING TO THE SKIN OF TRICERATOPS . . IIQ 32. SKELETON OF DIMORPHODON MACRONYX . . + - + « «+ 124 33. SKELETON OF SCAPHOGNATHUS CRASSIROSTRIS. . + «© + + 125 34. SKELETON OF PTERODACTYLUS SPECTABILIS . . . + + ~- 426 35. SKELETON OF RHAMPHORHYNCHUS PHYLLURUS . . - - ~ 128 36, SKULL OF PTERANODON . = - « s = 2 = % % =) eRe 37. SKULL OF MoSASAURUS HOFFMANNI. .~ ~ «© © + + © «© 137 38. TEETH OF MOSASAURUS. 2%... © «© & > = (Sue a9, Lower ToorH of LEIODON ~ = «© + = + =. =) =) 40, SNOUT OF TYLOSAURUS. . =s © © 2 + + «s|] + = Suge 41. SKELETON OF CLIDASTES CINERIARUM . . «© + + + «© «+ 145 Ata. SKULL OF PLATECARPUS » 2 = 5 + 5 . + . 4 2] 42. SKELETON OF TINOCERAS INGENS. - - - + + + + + + 150 43. SKULL OF DINOCERAS MIRABILE .~- . - - + + “© “= © aRe 44. CAST OF BRAIN-CAVITY OF DINOCERAS MIRABILE. . - ~- + 152 45. SKELETON OF BRONTOPS ROBUSTUS - - - - + + + «+ + IOI 46. SKULL OF SIVATHERIUM GIGANTEUM - . . +. . + + + 168 47. SKELETON OF SIVATHERIUM GIGANTEUM . - - +. + + «+ 169 48. RESTORED FIGURE OF GIGANTIC TORTOISE, COLOSSOCHELYS ATLAS 20 £0 Fo of (0S Of fe ce 1s NR ee 49. THE ELEPHANT VICTORIOUS OVER THE TORTOISE, SUPPORTING THE WORLD, .AND UNFOLDING THE MYSTERIES OF THE SPAUTNA SIVADRENSIS 740) GM ke Ye 2 i: ‘| Je) Ve Mee) oh 50. SKELETON OF SCELIDOTHERIUM - - + + + + © + © + 184. 51. EXTINCT GIGANTIC ARMADILLO, GLYPTODON CLAVIPES. . . 190 52. SKELETON OF MAMMOTH, ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS. « + + + 203 53. FIGURE OF THE MAMMOTH, ENGRAVED ON MAMMOTH IVORY . 5 Sey 54. SKELETON OF MASTODON ARVERNENSIS+ « + * + + = = 218 55. HEAD OF WOOLLY RHINOCEROS » »- + + + + + <# + =» 224 56. SKELETON OF THE ELEPHANT-FOOTED MOA, DINORNIS ELE- PEIANTORUS | fis: uss he. re) Cahier tn lie) ce os pee 57. SKELETON OF GREAT IRISH DEER, CERVUS GIGANTEUS . ~ 242 58. SKELETON OF RHYTINA GIGAS + + + © 6 + © © + + 247 EXTINGT: MONSPERS: INTRODUCTION. ‘* The earth hath gathered to her breast again - And yet again, the millions that were born Of her unnumbered, unremembered tribes.” LET us see if we can get some glimpses of the primeval inhabi- tants of the world, that lived and died while as yet there were no men and women having authority over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air. We shall, perhaps, find this antique world quite as strange as the fairyland of Grimm or Lewis Carroll.. True, it was not inhabited by “‘slithy toves” or “jabber-wocks,” but by real beasts, of whose shapes, sizes, and habits much is already known —a good deal more than might at first be supposed. And yet, real as it allis, this antique world—this panorama of scenes that have for ever passed away—is a veritable fairy-land. In those days of which geologists tell us, the principal parts were played, not by kings and queens, but by creatures many of which “were very unlike those we see around us now. And yet it is no fairy-land after all, where impossible things happen, and where impossible dragons figure largely; but only the same old world in which you and I were born. Everything you will see here is quite true. All these monsters once lived. ‘Truth is B 2 EXTINCT MONSTERS. stranger than fiction; and perhaps we shall enjoy our visit to this fairy-land all the more for that reason. For not even the dragons supposed to have been slain by armed knights in old times, when people gave ear to any tale, however extravagant, could equal in size or strength the real dragons we shall presently meet with, whose actual bones may be seen in the Natura! History Museum at South Kensington. Many people who visit this great museum and find their way to the geological galleries on the right, pass hastily by the cases of bones, teeth, and skeletons. These things, it seems, fail to interest them. ‘They do not know how to interpret them. They cannot picture to themselves the kinds of creatures to which the relics once belonged ; and so they pass them by and presently go to the more attractive collection of stuffed birds on the other side. There they see the feathered tribes of the air all beautifully arranged ; some poised in the air by almost invisible wires ; some perched on branches: but all surrounded by grass, flowers, and natural objects, imitated with marvellous reality, so that they see the birds as they really are in nature, and can almost fancy they hear them singing. Now, it has often occurred to ihe present writer that seme- thing more might be done for the long-neglected “‘ lost creations ” of the world, to bring them out of their obscurity, that they may be made to tell to the passer-by their wondrous story. We can, however, well imagine some of our readers asking, “ Can these dry bones live?” “Yes,” we would say, ‘‘they can be made to live; reason and imagination will, if we give them proper play, provide us eyes wherewith to see the world’s lost creations.” ‘To such men as Cuvier, Owen, Huxley, and others, these dry bones do live. It will be our object to describe to the reader some of the wonderful results that have rewarded the lifelong labours of such great men. We shall take some of the largest and strangest forms of life that once lived, and try to picture them as they really were when alive, whether walking on ENSRODOECLION: 3 land, swimming in the sea, or flying in the air; to understand the meanings of their more obvious structures ; and to form some conclusions with regard to their habits, as well as to find out, if possible, their relations,—as far as such questions have been answered by those most qualified to settle these difficult matters. All technical details, such as the general reader is unfamiliar with, will be as far as possible suppressed. Let us fancy a long procession of extinct monsters passing in single file before us, and ourselves endeavouring to pick out their “‘ points” as they present themselves to the eye of imagination. It is not, be it remembered, mere imagination that guides the man of science in such matters, for all his conclusions are carefully based on reason ; -and when conclusions are given, we shall endeavour to show how they have been arrived at. For millions of years countless multitudes of living animals have played their little parts on the earth and passed away, to be buried up in the oozy beds of the seas of old time, or entombed with the leaves that sank in the waters of primeval lakes. The majority of these perished beyond all recovery, leaving not a trace behind ; yet a vast number of fossilised remains have been, in various ways, preserved; sometimes almost as completely as if Dame Nature had thoughtfully embalmed them for our instruction and delight. Down in those old seas and lakes she kept her great museum, in order to preserve for us a selection of her treasures. In course of time she slowly raised up sea-beds and lake-bottoms to ‘ make them into dry land. This museum is everywhere around us. We have but to enter quarries and railway cuttings, or to search in coal-mines, or under cliffs at the seaside, and we can consult her records. As the ancient Egyptians built tombs, pyramids, and temples, from which we may learn their manner of life and partly read their history, so Nature has entombed, not one race only, but many races of the children of life. Her 4 EXTINCT MONSTERS. records are written in strange hieroglyphs, yet it is not difficult to interpret their meaning; and thus many an old story, many an old scene, may be pictured in the mind of man. Shall we call this earth-drama a tragedy or a comedy? Doubt- less tragic scenes occurred at times; as, for instance, when fierce creatures engaged in deadly combat: and _ probably amusing, if not comic, incidents took place occasionally, such as might have provoked us to laughter, had we been there to see them. But let us simply call it a drama. Backgrounds of scenery were not wanting. Then, as now, the surface of the earth was clothed with vegetation, and strange cattle pastured on grassy plains. Vegetation was at times very luxuriant. The forests of the coal period, with their giant reeds and club-moss trees, must have made a strange picture. Then, as now, there rose up from the plains lofty ranges of mountains, reaching to the clouds, their summits clothed with the eternal snows. These, too, played their part, feeding the streams and the rivers that meandered over the plains, bringing life and fertility with them, as they do now. The sun shone and the wind blew: sometimes gently, so that the leaves just whispered in an evening breeze ; at other times so violently that the giants of the forest swayed to and fro, and the seas lashed themselves furiously against rocky coasts. Nor were the underground forces of the earth less active than they are now: volcanic eruptions often took place on a mag- nificent scale ; volcanoes poured out fiery lava streams for leagues beneath their feet; great showers of ashes and fine dust were ejected in the air, so that the sun was darkened for a time, and the surface of the sea was covered for many miles with floating pumice and volcanic dust, which in time sank to the bottom, and was made into hard rock, such as we now find on the top of Snowdon. Earthquake shocks were quite as frequent, and no doubt the ground swayed to and fro, or was rent open as some unusually great earth-movement took place, and perhaps a mountain INTRODUCTION. 5 range was raised several feet or yards higher. All this we learn from the testimony of the rocks beneath our feet. It only requires the use of a little imagination to conjure up scenes of the past, and paint them as on a moving diorama. We shall not, however, dwell at any length on the scenery, or the vegetation that clothed the landscape at different periods; for these features are sufficiently indicated in the beautiful drawings of extinct animals by our artist, Mr. J. Smit. The researches of the illustrious Baron Cuvier, at Paris, as embodied in his great work, Ossemens Fossiles, gave a great impetus to the study of organic remains. It was he who laid the foundations of the science of Paleontology,’ which, though much has already been accomplished, yet has a great future before it. Agassiz, Owen, Huxley, Marsh, Cope, and others, following in his footsteps, have greatly extended its boundaries; but he was the pioneer. Before his time fossil forms were very little known, and still less understood. His researches, especially among vertebrates, or back-boned animals, revealed an altogether undreamed-of wealth of entombed remains. It is true the old and absurd notion that fossils were mere ‘ sports of Nature,” sometimes bearing more or less resemblance to living animals, but still only an accidental (!) resemblance, had been abandoned by Leibnitz, Buffon, and Pallas; and that Daubenton had actually compared the fossil bones of quadrupeds with those of living forms; while Camper declared his opinion that some of these remains belonged to extinct species of quadrupeds. It is to Cuvier, however, that the world owes the first systematic application of the science of comparative anatomy, which he himself had done so much to place on a sound basis, to the study of the bones of fossil animals. He paid great attention to 1 Paleontology is the science which treats of the living beings, whether animal or vegetable, which have inhabited this globe at past periods in its history. (Greek—fa/azos, ancient ; ov¢a, beings; /ogos, discourse.) 6 EXTINCT MONSTERS. the relative shapes of animals, and the different developments of the same kind of bones in various animals, and especially to the nature of their teeth. So great did his experience and knowledge become, that he rarely failed in naming an animal from a part of its skeleton. He appreciated more clearly than others before him the mutual dependence of the various parts of an animal’s organi- sation. ‘‘The organism,” he said, ‘‘ forms a connected unity, in which the single parts cannot change without modifications in the other parts.” It will hardly be necessary to give examples of this now well- known truth; but, just to take one case: the elephant has a long proboscis with which it can reach the ground, and con- sequently its neck is quite short; but take away the long proboscis, and you would seriously interfere with the relation of various parts of its structure to each other. How, then, could it reach or pick up anything lying on the ground? Other changes would have to follow: either its legs would require to be shortened, or its neck to be lengthened. In every animal, as in a complex machine, there is a mutual dependence of the different parts. As he progressed in these studies, Cuvier was able with considerable success to restore extinct animals from their fossilised remains, to discover their habits and manner of life, and to point out their nearest living ally. To him we owe the first complete demonstration of the possibility of restoring an extinct animal. His ‘‘ Law of Correlation” however, has been found to be not infallible; as Professor Huxley has shown, it has exceptions. It expresses our experience among living animals, but, when applied to the more ancient types of life, is liable to be mis- leading. To take one out of many examples of this law: Carnivorous animals, such as cats, lions, and tigers, have claws in their feet, very different from the hoofs of an ox, which is herbivorous ; while the teeth of the former group are very different to those of INTRODUCTION. 7 the latter. Thus the teeth and limbs have a certain definite relation to each other, or, in other words, are correlated. Again, horned quadrupeds are all herbivorous (or graminivorous), and have hoofs to their feet. The following amusing anecdote serves to illustrate Cuvier’s law. One of his students thought he would try and frighten his master, and, having dressed up as a wild beast, entered Cuvier’s bedroom by night, and, presenting himself by his bedside, said in hollow tones, ‘‘ Cuvier, Cuvier, I’ve come to eat you!” ‘The great naturalist, who on waking up was able to discern something with horns and hoofs, simply remarked, ** What! horns, hoofs—graminivorous—you can’t!” What better lesson could the master have given the pupil to help him to remember his ‘‘ Law of Correlation” ? Cuvier’s great work, entitled Ossemens Fossiles, will long remain an imperishable monument of the genius and industry of the greatest pioneer in this region of investigation. This work proved beyond a doubt to his astonished contemporaries the great antiquity of the tribes of animals now living on the surface of the earth. It proved more than that, however; for it showed the existence of a great philosophy in Nature which linked the past with the present in a scheme that pointed to a continuity of life during untold previous ages. All this was directly at variance with the prevalent ideas of his time, and consequently his views were regarded by many with alarm, and he received a good deal of abuse—a fate which many other original thinkers before him have shared. » It is somewhat difficult for people living now, and accustomed to modern teaching, to realise how novel were the conclusions announced by Cuvier. In his Descourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, translated into most European languages under the title Zheory of the Earth, he lays down, among others, the two following propositions :— 1. That all organised existences were not created at the same time; but at different times, probably very remote from each 8 EXTINCT MONSTERS. other—vegetables before animals, mollusca and fishes before reptiles, and the latter before mammals. 2. That fossil remains in the more recent strata are those which approach nearest to the present type of corresponding living species. Teaching such as this gave a new impetus to the study of organic remains, and Palsontology, as a science, began with Cuvier. CHAPTER I. HOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED. *Geology, beyond almost every other science, offers fields of research adapted to all capacities and to every condition and circumstance of life in which we may be placed. For while some of its phenomena require the highest intellectual powers, and the greatest attainments in abstract science for their successful investigation, many of its problems may be solved by the most ordinary intellect, and facts replete with the deepest interest may be gleaned by the most casual observer.’-—MANTELL. LET us suppose we are visiting a geological museum for the first time, passing along from one department to another with ever- increasing wonder—now admiring the beautiful polished marbles from Devonshire, with their delicate corals, or the wonderful fishes from the Old Red Sandstone, with their plates of enamel ; now the delicate shells and ammonites from the Lias or Oolites, with their pearly lustre still preserved; now the white fresh- looking shells from the Isle of Wight ; now the ponderous bones and big teeth of ancient monsters from the Wealden beds of Sussex. The question might naturally occur, ‘‘ How were all these creatures preserved from destruction and decay, and sealed up so securely that it is difficult to believe they are as old as the geologists tell us they are?” It will be worth our while to con- sider this before we pass on to describe the creatures themselves. Now, in the first place, ‘‘fossils” are not always “‘ petrifactions,”’ as some people seem to think ; that is to say, they are not all turned into stone. ‘This is true in many cases, no doubt, yet one frequently comes across the remains of plants and animals that 10 EXTINCT MONSTERS. have undergone very little change, and have, as it were, been simply sealed up. The state of a fossil depends on several cir- cumstances, such as the soil, mud, or other medium in which it may happen to be preserved. Again, the newest, or most recent, fossils are generally the least altered. We have fossils of all ages, and in all states of preservation. As examples of fossils very little altered, we may take the case of the wonderful collection of bones discovered by Professor Boyd Dawkins in caves in various parts of Great Britain. The results of many years of research are given in his most interesting book on Cave-Hunting. ‘This enthusiastic explorer and geologist has discovered the remains of a great many animals, some of which are quite extinct, while others are still living in this country. ‘These remains belong to a late period, when lions, tigers, cave-bears, wolves, hyzenas, and reindeer inhabited our country. In some cases the caves were the dens of hyzenas, who brought their prey into caverns in our limestone rocks, to devour them at their leisure; for the marks of their teeth may yet be seen on the bones. In other cases the bones seem to have been washed into the caves by old streams that have ceased to run; but in all cases they are fairly fresh, though often stained by iron-rust brought in by water that has dissolved iron out of various rocks—for iron is a substance met with almost everywhere in nature. Sometimes they are buried up in a layer of soil, or ‘‘cave-earth,” and at other times in a layer of stalagmite—a deposit of carbonate of lime gradually formed on the floors of caves by the evaporation of water charged with carbonate of lime. Air and water are great destroyers of.animal and vegetable substances from which life has departed. ‘The autumn leaves that fall by the wayside soon undergo change, and become at last separated or resolved into their original elements. In the same way when any wild animal, such as a bird or rabbit, dies in an exposed place, its flesh decays under the influence of rain and wind, so that before long nothing but dry bones is left. Hamlet’s wish that : mOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE’ PRESERVED. %% this “too too solid flesh would melt” is soon realised after death ; and that active chemical element in the air known as oxygen, in breathing which we live, has a tenfold power over dead matter, slowly causing chemical actions somewhat similar to those that take place in a burning candle, whereby decaying flesh is con- verted into water-vapour and carbonic acid gas. ‘Thus we see that oxygen not only supports life, but breaks up into simpler forms the unwholesome and dangerous products of decaying matter, thus keeping the atmosphere sweet and pure; but in time, even the dry bones of the bird or rabbit, though able for a longer period to resist the attacks of the atmosphere, crumble into dust, and serve to fertilise the soil that once supported them. Now, if water and air be excluded, it is wonderful how long even the most perishable things may be preserved from this other- wise universal decay. In the Edinburgh museum of antiquities may be seen an old wooden cask of butter that has lain for centuries in peat—which substance has a curiously preservative power; and human bodies have been dug out of Irish peat with the flesh well preserved, which, from the nature of the costume worn by the person, we can tell to be very ancient. Meat packed in tins, so as to be entirely excluded from the air, may be kept a very long time, and will be found to be quite fresh and fit for use. But air and water have a way of penetrating into all sorts of places, so that in nature they are almost everywhere. Water can slowly filter through even the hardest rocks, and since it contains dissolved air, it causes the decay of animal or vegetable sub- stances. Take the case of a dead leaf falling into a lake, or some quiet pool ina river. It sinks to the bottom, and is buried up in gravel, mud, or sand. Now, our leaf will stand a very poor chance of preservation on a sandy or gravelly bottom, because these materials, being porous, allow the water to pass through them easily. But if it settles down on fine mud it may be covered up and become a fossil. In time the soft mud will harden into 12 EXTINCT MONSTERS. clay or shale, retaining a delicate impression of the leaf; and even after thousands of years, the brown body of the leaf will be there, only partly changed. In the case of the plants found in coal, the lapse of ages since they were buried up has been so great (and the strata have been so affected by the great pressure and by the earth’s internal heat) that certain chemical changes have converted leaves and stems into carbon and some of its compounds, much in the same way that, if you heat wood in a closed vessel, you convert it into charcoal, which is mostly carbon. The coal we burn in our fires is entirely of vegetable origin, and every seam in a coal-mine is a buried forest of trees, ferns, reeds, and other plants. The reader will understand how it is that rocks composed of hardened sand or gravel, sandstones and conglomerates, contain but few fossils; while, on the other hand, such rocks as clay, shale, slate, and limestone often abound in fossils, because they are formed of what was once soft mud, that sealed up and protected corals, shell-fish, sea-urchins, fishes, and other marine animals, Had they been covered up in sand the chances are that percolating water would have slowly dissolved the shells and corals, the hard coats of the crabs, and the bones of the fishes, all of which are composed of carbonate of lime ; and we know that is a substance easily dissolved by water. It is in the rocks formed during the later geological periods that we find fossils least changed from their original state ; for time works great changes, and too little time has elapsed since those periods for any considerable alterations to have taken place. But when we come to examine some of the earlier rocks, which have been acted upon in various ways for long periods of time, such as the pressure of vast piles of overlying rocks, and the percolation of water charged with mineral substances (water sometimes warmed by the earth’s internal heat), then we may expect to find the remains of the world’s lost creations in a much more mineralised condition. Every fossil-collector must be familiar HOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED. ug with examples of changes of this kind. For instance, shells originally composed of carbonate of lime are often found to have been turned into flint or silica. Another curious change is illus- trated in the case of a stratum found in Cambridgeshire and other counties. In this remarkable layer, only about a foot in thickness, one frequently finds bones and teeth of fishes and reptiles. These, however, have all undergone a curious change, whereby they have been converted into phosphate of lime—a compound of phosphorus and lime. It abounds in ‘‘nodules,” or lumps, of this substance, which, along with thousands of fossils, are every year ground up and converted by a chemical process into valuable artificial manure for the farmer. The soft parts of animals, as we have said before, cannot be preserved in a fossil state ; but, as if to compensate for this loss, we sometimes meet with the most faithful and delicate impres- sions. ‘Thus, cuttle-fishes have, in some instances, left, on the clays which buried them up, impressions of their soft, long arms, or tentacles, and, as the mud hardened into solid rock, the im- pressions are fixed imperishably. Examples of these interesting records may be seen at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. Even soft jelly-fishes have left their mark on certain rocks! At a place in Bavaria, called Solenhofen, there is a remarkably fine-grained limestone containing a multitude of wonderful impressions. This stone is well known to lithographers, and is largely used in printing. On it the oldest known bird has left its skeleton and faithful impressions of its feathers. The footprints of birds and reptiles are by no means un- common. Such records are most valuable, for a great deal may be learned from even a footprint as to the nature of the animal that made it (see p. 79). Since the greater number of animals described in this book are reptiles, quadrupeds, and other inhabitants of the land, and only a few had their home in the sea, we must endeavour to try and understand how their remains may have been preserved. Our 14 EXTINCT MONSTERS. object in writing this book is to interpret their story, and, as it were, to bring them to life again. Each one must be made to tell its own story, and that story will be far from complete if we cannot form some idea of how it found its way into a watery grave, and so was added to Nature’s museum. For this purpose we must briefly explain to the reader how the rocks we see around us have been deposited ; for these rocks are the tombs in which lost creations lie. Go into any’ ordinary quarry, where the men are at work, getting out the stone in blocks to be used in building, or for use on the roads, or for some other purpose, and you will be pretty sure to notice at the first glance that the rock is arranged as if it had been built up in layers. Now, this is true of all rocks that have been laid down by the agency of water—as most of them have been. True, there are exceptions, but every rule has its exceptions. If you went into a granite quarry at Aberdeen, or a basalt quarry near Edinburgh, you would not see these layers; but such rocks as these do not contain fossils. ‘They have been mainly formed by the action of great heat, and were forced up to the surface of the earth by pressure from below. As they slowly cooled, the mineral substances of which they were formed gradually crystallised ; and it is this crystalline state, together with the signs of move- ment, that tells us of their once heated state. Such rocks are said to be of igneous origin (Lat. zgmzs, fire). But nearly all the other rocks were formed by the action of water—that is, under water,—and hence are known to geologists as aqueous deposits (Lat. agua, water). They may be considered as sediments that slowly settled down in seas, lakes, or at the mouths of rivers. Such deposits are in the course of being formed at the present day. All round our coasts mud, sand, and gravel are being accumulated, layer by layer. ‘These materials are constantly being swept off the land by the action of rain and rivers, and carried down to the sea. Perhaps, when staying at the sea-side, you may have noticed, after rainy ard rough weather, how the sea, for some WOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED. 5 distance from the shore, is discoloured with mud—especially at the mouth of ariver. The sand, being heavy, soon sinks down, and this is the reason why sand-bars so frequently block the entrance to rivers. Then again, the waves of the sea beat against the sea-shore and undermine the cliffs, bringing down great fragments, which after a time are completely broken up and worn down into rounded pebbles, or even fine sand and mud. It is very easy to see that in this way large quantities of sand, gravel, and mud are continually supplied to our seas. We can picture how they will settle down ; the sand not far from the shore, and the fine mud further out to sea. When the rough weather ceases, the river becomes smaller and flows less rapidly, so that when the coarse débris of the land has settled down to form layers, or strata, of sand and gravel, then the fine mud will begin to settle down also, and will form a layer overlying them or further out. Thus we learn, from a little observation of what is now going on, how layers of sand and mud, such as we see in a quarry, were made thousands and thousands of years ago. When we think of all the big rivers and small streams con- tinually flowing into the sea, we shall begin to realise what a great work rain and rivers are doing in making the rocks of the future. If, at a later period, a slight upheaval of the sea-bed were to take place so as to bring it above water, and such is very likely, these materials would be found neatly arranged in layers, and more or less hardened into solid rock. The reader may, perhaps, find it rather hard at first to realise that in this simple way vast deposits of rock are being formed in the seas of the present day, and that the finer material thus derived from a continent may be carried by ocean currents to great distances; but so it is. Over thousands of square miles of ocean, deposits are being gradually accumu- lated which will doubtless be some day turned into hard rock. Just to take one example: it has been found that in the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of over two hundred miles from the 16 EXTINCT MONSTERS. mouth of that great river, the Amazon, the sea is discoloured by fine sediment. There is another kind of rock frequently met with, the building up of which cannot be explained in the way we have pointed out ; and that is limestone. This rock has not been deposited as a sediment, like clays and sandstones, but geologists have good reasons for believing that it has been gradually formed in the deeper and clearer parts of oceans by the slow accumulation of marine shells, corals, and other creatures, whose bodies are partly composed of carbonate of lime. ‘This seems incredible at first, but the proofs are quite convincing.! As Professor Huxley well remarked, there is as good evidence that chalk has been built up by the accumulation of minute shells as that the Pyramids were built by the ancient Egyptians. The science of geology reveals the startling fact that all the great series of the stratified rocks, whose united thickness is over 80,000 feet, has been mainly accumulated under water, either by the action of those powerful geological agents—rain and rivers— or through the agency of myriads of tiny marine animals. When we have grasped this idea, we have learned our first, and, perhaps, most useful lesson in geology. Now let us apply what has been above explained to the question immediately before us. We want to know how the skeletons of animals living on land came to be buried up under water, among the stratified rocks that are to be seen all over our country, and most of which were made under the sea. We can answer this question by going to Nature herself, in order to find out what is actually going on at the present time, by inquiring into the habits of land animals, their surroundings, and the accidents to which they are liable at sundry times and in divers manners. Itis by this simple method of studying present actions that nearly all difficult questions in geology may be solved. The leading principle of the geologist is to interpret the past by 1 See The Autobiography of the Earth, p. 223. OW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE. PRESERVED, 17 the light of the present, or, in other words, to find out what happens now, in order to learn what took place ages ago ; for itis clear that the world has been going on in the same way for at least as far back as geological history can take us. There has been a uniformity, or sameness, in Nature’s actions ever since living things first dwelt on the earth. 3 Just as rivers are mainly responsible for bringing down to the sea the materials of which rocks are made, so these universal carrying agents are the means by which the bodies of many animals that live in the plains, over which they wander, are brought to their last resting-place. We have only to consult the records of great floods to see what fearful havoc they sometimes make among living things, and how the dead bodies are swept away. Great floods rise rapidly, so that the herds of wild antmals pasturing on grassy plains are surprised by the rising waters, and, being unable to withstand the force of the water, are hurried along, and so drowned. When dead they sink to the bottom, and may, in some cases, be buried up in the dédris hurried along by the river; but as a rule their bodies, being swollen by the gases formed by decomposing flesh, rise again to the surface, and consequently may be carried along for many a mile, till they reach some lake, or perhaps right down to the mouth of a river, and so may be taken out to sea. One or two examples will be given to show how important is the action of such floods. Sir Charles Lyell has given some striking illustrations of this. There was a memorable flood in the southern borders of Scotland on the 24th of June, 1794, which caused great destruction in the region of the Solway Firth. Heavy rains had fallen, so that every stream entering the firth was greatly swollen. Not only sheep and cattle, but even herds- men and shepherds were drowned. When the flood had subsided, a fearful spectacle was seen on a large sand-bank, called “the © beds of Esk,” where the waters meet; for on this one bank were e 18 EXTINCT MONSTERS. found collected together the bodies of 9 black cattle, 3 horses, 1840 sheep, 45 dogs, 180 hares, together with those of many smaller animals, also the corpses of two men and one woman. Humboldt, the celebrated traveller, says that when, at certain seasons, the large rivers of South America are swollen by heavy rains, great numbers of quadrupeds are drowned every year. Troops of wild horses that graze in the ‘‘savannahs,” or grassy plains, are said to be swept away in thousands. In Java, in the year 1699, the Batavian River was flooded during an earthquake, and drowned buffaloes, tigers, rhinoceroses, deer, apes, crocodiles, and other wild beasts, which were brought down to the coast by the current. In tropical countries, where very heavy rains fall at times, and rivers become rapidly swollen, floods are a great source of danger to man and beast. Probably the greater number of the bodies of animals thus drowned find their way into lakes, through which rivers flow, and never reach the sea ; and if the growth of sediment in such lakes goes on fairly rapidly, their remains may be buried up, and so preserved. But in many cases the bones fall one by one from the floating carcase, and so may in that way be scattered at random over the bottom of the lake, or the bed of ariver at its mouth. In hot countries such bodies, on reach- ing the sea, run a great chance of being instantly devoured by sharks, alligators, and other carnivorous animals. But during very heavy floods, the waters that reach the sea are so heavily laden with mud, that these predaceous animals are obliged to retire to some place where the waters are clear, so that at such times the dead bodies are more likely to escape their ravages; and, at the same time, the mud with which the waters are charged falls so rapidly that it may quickly cover them up. We shall find further on that this explanation probably applies to the case of the ‘‘ fish-lizards,” whose remains are found in the Lias formation (see p. 51). But, for several reasons, sedimentary rocks formed in lakes HOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED. 19 are much more likely to contain the remains of land animals, than those that were formed in seas, and they are more likely to be in a complete state of preservation. Within the last century, five or six small lakes in Scotland, which had been artificially drained, yielded the remains of several hundred skeletons of stags, oxen, boars, horses, sheep, dogs, hares, foxes, and wolves. ‘There are two ways in which these animals may have met with a watery grave. In the first place, they may have got mired on going into the water, or in trying to land on the other side, after swimming across. Any one who knows Scotch lakes will be familiar with the fact that their margins are often most treacherous ground for bathers. The writer has more than once found it necessary to be very cautious on wading into a lake while fishing, or in search of plants. Secondly, when such lakes are frozen over in winter, the ice is often very treacherous in consequence of numerous springs; and animals attempting to cross may be easily drowned. No remains of birds were dis- covered in these lakes, in spite of the fact that, until drained, they were largely frequented by water-fowl. But it must be remembered that birds are protected by their powers of flight from perishing in such ways as other animals frequently do. And, even should they die on the water, their bodies are not likely to be submerged ; for, being light and feathery, they do not sink, but continue floating until the body rots away, or is devoured by some creature such as a hungry pike. For these reasons the remains of birds are unfortunately very rare in the stratified rocks; and hence our knowledge of the bird life of former ages is slight, THE IMPERFECTION OF THE RECORD. A very little consideration will serve to convince us that the record which Nature has kept in the stratified rocks is an incom- plete one. There are many reasons why it must be so. It is 20 EXTINCT MONSTERS. not to be expected that these rocks should contain anything like a complete collection of the remains of the various tribes of plants and animals that from time to time have flourished in seas, lakes, and estuaries, or on islands and continents of the world. In endeavouring to trace the course of life on the globe at successive periods, we are continually met by want of evidence due to the “imperfection of the record ””—to use Darwin’s phrase. The reasons are not far to seek. The preservation of organic remains, or even of impressions thereof, in sedimentary strata is, to some extent, a matter of chance. It is obvious that no wholly soft creature, such as a jelly-fish, can be preserved ; although on some strata they have left impressions telling of their existence at a very early period. A creature, to become fossilised, must possess some hard part, such as a shell, ¢.g. an oyster (fossil oysters abound in some strata) ; or a hard chitinous covering, like that of the shrimp, or the trilobites of Silurian times; or a skeleton, such as all the backboned (vertebrate) animals possess. But even creatures that had skeletons have not by any means always been preserved. Bones, when left on the bottom of the sea, where no sediment, or very little, is forming, will decay, and so disappear altogether. As Darwin points out, we are in error in supposing that over the greater part of the ocean-bed of the present day sediment is deposited fast enough to seal up organic remains before they can decay. Over a large part of the ocean- bed such cannot be the case; and this conclusion has, of late years, been confirmed by the observations made during the fruitful voyage of H.M.S. Challenger in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Again, even in shallower parts of the old seas, where sand or mud was once deposited, fossilisation was somewhat accidental ; for some materials, being porous, allow of the percolation of water, and in this way shells, bones, etc., have been dissolved and lost. Thus sandstone strata are always barren in fossils compared to HOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED, 21 shales and limestones, which are much less pervious. To take examples from our own country, the New Red Sandstone of the south-west of England, the midland counties, Cheshire, and other parts contains very few fossils indeed, while the clays and lime- stones of the succeeding Lias period abound in organic remains of all sorts. Even insects have left delicate impressions of their wings and bodies! while shells, corals, encrinites, fish-teeth, and bones of saurians are found in great numbers. Again, it must be borne in mind that the series of stratified rocks known to geologists is not complete or unbroken. They have been well compared to the leaves of a book on history, of which whole chapters and many separate pages have been torn out. These gaps, or ‘‘ breaks,” are due to what is called “‘ denu- dation ;” that is to say, a great many rocks, after having been slowly deposited in water, have been upraised to form dry land, and then, being subjected for ages to the destroying action of “rain and rivers,” or the waves of the sea, have been largely destroyed. Such rocks, in the language of geology, have been “‘ denuded ;” that is, stripped off, so that the underlying rocks are left bare. But the process of rock-making does not go on continuously in any one area. Sedimentary strata have been formed in slowly sinking areas. But, if subsidence ceases, and the downward movement becomes an upward one, then the bed of the sea is converted into dry land, and the geological record is broken ; for aqueous strata do not form on dry land. Blown sands and terrestrial lava-flows are exceptions ; but such accumulations are very small and insignificant, and may therefore be neglected, especially as they contain no fossils. In this way, as well as by the process of “ denudation” already alluded to, breaks occur; and these breaks often represent long intervals of time. ‘There are several such gaps in the British series of stratified rocks; and it is partly by means of these breaks, during which important geographical and other changes 22 EXTINCT MONSTERS. took place, that sedimentary rocks have been classified and arranged in groups representing geological periods. Thus, the Cainozoic, or Tertiary, rocks of the Thames’ basin are separated by a long “break” from those of the preceding Cretaceous period. During that interval great changes in animal life took place, whereby, in the course of evolution, new types appeared on the scene. (See Table of Strata, Appendix I.) Another cause interfering with the record is to be found in those important internal changes that have taken place in stratified rocks—often over large areas—which may be ascribed to the influence of heat and pressure combined. This process of change, whereby soft deposits have been altered or ‘“‘ metamor- phosed ” into hard crystalline rocks, is known as ‘“‘ metamorphism.” Metamorphic rocks have lost not only their original structure and appearance, but also their included organic remains, or fossils. Thus, when a soft limestone has been converted by these means into crystalline statuary marble, any fossils it may once have contained have been destroyed. It is true that this applies more to older and lower deposits,—for the lowest are the oldest—but there can be no doubt that valuable records of the forms of life which peopled the world in former periods have been lost by this means. And lastly, it must ever be borne in mind that, as yet, our know- ledge of the stratified rocks of the earth’s crust is very limited. In course of time, no doubt, this deficiency will be to a great extent made good ; but it will take a long time. Already, within the last thirty years, the labours of zealous geologists in the colonies and in various countries have added largely to our know- ledge of the geological record. Still, only a small portion of the earth’s surface has at present been explored; and doubtless one may look forward to future discoveries of extinct forms of animal and plant life as wonderful and strange as those that have been of late years unearthed in the “ far West,” in Africa, and India. The Siwalik Hills of Northern India offer a rich harvest of fossils HOW EXTINCT MONSTERS ARE PRESERVED. 23 to future explorers. Already, one remarkable and large horned quadruped has come from this region; and it is known that other valuable treasures are sealed up within these hills, only awaiting the “‘ open sesame” of some enterprising explorer to bring them to light. As previously pointed out, deposits formed in lakes are the most promising field for geologists in search of the remains of old terrestrial quadrupeds and reptiles; but, unfortunately, such deposits are rare. It is very much to be regretted that the carelessness and in- difference of ignorant workmen in quarries, clay-pits, and railway cuttings have sometimes been the cause of valuable fossils being broken up, and so lost for ever. Unless they are accustomed to the visits of fossil-collectors who will pay them liberally for their finds, the men will not take the trouble to preserve any bones they may come across in the course of their work. (An example of this negligence will be found on p. 95.) But when once they realise that such finds have what political economists call an “ exchange value,” or, in other words, can be turned into money, it is astonishing what zealous guardians of Nature’s treasures they become! For this reason collectors often find what Professor Bonney calls the “silver hammer ”—in other words, cash—more effective than the iron implement they carry with them. CHAPTER Wie SEA-SCORPIONS. *¢ And some rin up the hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to pieces wi’ hammers like sae many road-makers run daft. They say ’tis to see how the warld was made.”—S¢. Ronan’s Well. Our first group of monsters is taken from a tribe of armed warriors that lived in the seas of a very ancient period in the world’s history. Like the crabs and lobsters inhabiting the coasts of Britain, they possessed a coat of armour, and jointed bodies, supplied with limbs for crawling, swimming, or seizing their prey. They were giants in their day, far eclipsing in size any of their relations that have lived on to the present time. Some of them, such as the Pterygotus (Fig. 1, p. 26), attained a length of nearly six feet. They belonged to the humbler ranks of life, and, if now living, would without doubt be assigned, by fishmongers ignorant of natural history, to that vague category of “‘shell-fish ” in which they include crabs, lobsters, mussels, etc. These lobster-like creatures, though ciaiming no relationship with the higher ranks of animals, may well engage our attention, not only for their great size, but also for their strange build. There are no living creatures quite like them. Certainly they are not true lobsters, and yet we may consider them to be first or second cousins of those ten-footed crustaceans * of the present 1 Crustaceans are a class of jointed creatures (articulate animals), possess- ing a hard shell or crust (Lat. erusta), which they cast periodically. They all breathe by gills. ‘l ALVIg "993 9 YIBua'y *SNANUOZA] S “SUAdIG~AAN ‘SHITEUYD SNIOSHAIZ J “SNOIdYOOS-Vas SEA-SCORPIONS. 26 day—lobsters, crabs, and shrimps, so welcome on the tables of both rich and poor. Some naturalists say that their nearest relations at the present day are the king-crabs inhabiting the China seas and the east coast of North America; and there certainly are some points of resemblance between them. Others say that they are related to scorpions, and for this reason we call them Sea- scorpions, (See Plate I.) The first feature we notice in these creatures is the way in which their bodies and limbs are divided into rings or joints. This fact tells us that they belong to that great division of animals called “ Articulates,” of which crabs, lobsters, spiders, centipedes, and insects are examples. The celebrated Linnzus called them all insects, because their bodies are in this way cut into divisions.* But this arrangement has since been abandoned. However, they are all built upon this simple plan, their bodies being like a series of rings, to which,are attached paired appendages or limbs, also composed of ae.. longer and some shorter. Now, there must be something very fitting and appropriate in this arrangement, for the creatures that are thus built up are far more numerous than any other group of animals. They must be particularly well qualified to fight the battle of life; for like a victorious army they have taken the world by storm, and still remain in possession. We find them everywhere—in seas, rivers, and lakes; in fields and forests; in the soil, and in all sorts of nooks and crannies ; in the air, and even upon or inside the bodies of other animals. Some of them, such as ants, bees, and wasps, show an intelligence that is simply marvellous, and have acquired social habits which excite our admiration. Articulate animals are a very ancient race, as well as a flourish- ing one, for the oldest rocks containing undoubted fossils—namely, certain slates found in Wales and the Lake District—tell us of a time when shallow seas swarmed with little articulate animals known as Zvilobites. ‘They were in appearance something like 1 Lat. zz, into, and seca, cut. 26 EXTINCT MONSTERS. wood-lice of the present day; and the record of the rocks tells us plainly that creatures built upon this plan have flourished ever since. We mention this because they are related to the king- crabs of the present day, and therefore to the huge old-fashioned sea-scorpions we are now considering. The best-known and largest of these creatures is represented in Fig. 1. It has received the name /éerygotus (or wing-eared) from certain fanciful resemblances pointed out by the quarrymen. Fic. 1.—Pterygotus anglicus. (After Woodward.) I. Upper side. 2. Under side. It was first discovered, along with others of its kind, by Hugh Miller, at Carmylie in Forfarshire, in a certain part of the Old Red Sandstone (see Table of Strata, Appendix I.) known as the Arbroath paving-stone. The quarrymen, in the course of their work, came upon and dug out large pieces of the fossilised remains SEA-SCORPIONS. 27 of this creature. Its hard coat of jointed armour bore on its surface curious wavy markings that suggested to their minds the sculptured feathers on the wings of cherubs—of all subjects of the chisel the most common. Hence they christened these remains **Seraphim.” They did not succeed in getting complete specimens that could be pieced together; and the part to which this fanciful name was given turned out to be part of the under side below the mouth. It was composed of several large plates, two of which are not unlike the wings of a cherub in shape. Hugh Miller says in his classic work, Zhe Old Red Sandstone—“ the form altogether, from its wing-like appearance, its feathery markings, and its angular points, will suggest to the reader the origin of the name given it by Forfarshire workmen.” A correct restoration, in proportion to the fragments found in the Lower Old Red Sandstone, would give a creature measuring nearly six feet in length, and more than a foot across. Prerygotus anglicus may therefore be justly considered a monster crustacean. The illustrious Cuvier, who, in the eighteenth century founded the science of comparative anatomy (see p. 5), astonished the scientific world by his bold interpretations of fossil bones. From a few broken fragments of bone he could restore the skeleton of an entire animal, and determine its habits and mode of living. When other wise men were unable to read the writing of Nature on the walls of her museum—in the shape of fossil bones—he came forward, like a second Daniel, to interpret the signs, and so instructed us how to restore the world’s lost creations. Hugh Miller submitted the fragments found at Balruddery to the celebrated naturalist Agassiz, a pupil of Cuvier, who had written a famous work on fossil fishes; and he says that he was much struck with the skill displayed by him in piecing together the fragments of the huge Pterygotus. ‘‘ Agassiz glanced over the collection. One specimen especially caught his attention—an elegantly symmetrical one. His eye brightened as he contem- plated it. ‘I will tell you,’ he said, turning to the company—‘ I 28 EXTINCT MONSTERS. will tell you what these are—the remains of a huge lobster.’ He arranged the specimens in the group before him with as much ease as I have seen a young girl arranging the pieces of ivory in an Indian puzzle. There is a homage due to supereminent genius, which Nature spontaneously pays when there are no low feelings of jealousy or envy to interfere with her operations; and the reader may well believe that it was willingly rendered on this occasion to the genius of Agassiz.” Agassiz himself, previous to this, had considered such fragments as he had seen to be the remains of fishes. As we have said before, this creature was zot a true lobster; but Agassiz, when he expressed the opinion just quoted, was not far off the mark, and did great service in showing it to be a crustacean. There were no lobsters or scorpions at that early period of the world’s history, and this creature, with its long ‘‘jaw-feet” and powerful tail, was a near approach to a king-crab on the one hand and scorpion on the other. [If living now, it would no doubt command a high price at Billingsgate ; but, then, it would be a dangerous thing to handle when alive, and might be more troublesome to catch than our crabs or lobsters. The front part of its body was entirely enveloped in a kind ‘of shield, called a carapace, bearing near the centre minute eyes, which probably were useless, and at the corners two large compound eyes, made up of numerous little lenses, such as we see in the eye of a dragon-fly. This is clearly proved by certain well-preserved specimens. There are five pairs of appendages, all attached under or near the head. Behind the head follow thirteen rings, or segments, the last of which forms the tail, two at least of these bore gills for breathing. All but two of them, below the mouth, must have been beautifully articulated, so as to allow them to move freely, as we see in the lobster of the present day. But look at that lowest and largest pair of appendages, the end joints of which are flattened out, and you will see that they must have been a powerful oar-like apparatus for swimming SEHA-SCORPIONS. 29 forwards. We can fancy this creature propelling itself much in the same way as a “ water-beetle” rows itself through the water in a pond. In all other crustaceans the antenne are used for feeling about, but in the Pterygotus they are used as claws for seizing the prey. In general external appearance, this huge Pterygotus greatly reminds us of a tiny fresh-water crustacean, known as Cyclops— because it has only one eye, like the giant in Homer’s Odyssey. This little creature, which is only + inch in length, is an inhabitant of ponds. From its large eyes, powerful oar-like limbs, or appendages, and from the general form of its body, Dr. Henry Woodward (the author of a learned monograph on these creatures) concludes that the Pterygotus was a very active animal; and the reader will easily gather from its pair of antennz, converted at their extremities into nippers, and from the nature of its “jaw-feet,” that the creature was a hungry and predaceous monster, seizing everything eatable that came in its way. The whole family to which it belongs—including Pterygotus, Eurypterus, Slimonia, Stylonurus, and others—seems to have been fitted for rather rapid motion, if we may judge from the long tapering and well-articulated body. In two forms (Pterygotus and Slimonia) the tail-flap probably served both as a powerful pro- peller, and as a rudder for directing the creature’s course spat others, such as Eurypterus and Stylonurus, had long sword-like tails, which may have assisted them to burrow into the sand, in the same way that king-crabs do. Eurypterus remipes is shown in Fig. 2. It has been stated above that our sea-scorpions are related to the king-crabs. Now, this creature, it is well known, burrows into the mud and sand at the bottom of the sea. This it does by shoving its broad sharp-edged head-shield downwards, working rapidly at the same time with its hinder feet, or appendages, and by pushing with the long spike that forms a kind of tail. It will thus sink deeper and deeper until nothing can be seen of its 30 EXTINCT MONSTERS. body, and only the eyes peep out of the mud. It will crawl and wander about by night, but remains hidden by day. Some of them are of large size, and occasionally measure two feet in length. They possess six pairs of well-formed feet, the joints of which, near the body, are armed with teeth and spines, and serve Fic. 2.—Silurian merostomata. 1. Stylonurus. 2. Eurypterus. (After Woodward.) the purpose of jaws, being used to masticate the food and force it into the mouth, which is situated between them. Now, this fact is of great importance; for it helps us to understand the use of the four pairs of “ jaw-feet” in our Sea- SEA-SCORPIONS. 31 scorpions. What curious animals they must have been, using the same limbs for walking, holding their prey, and eating! Look at the broad plates at the base of the oar-like limbs, or appendages, with their tooth-like edges. These are the plates found by Hugh Miller’s quarrymen, and compared by them to the wings of seraphim. You will easily perceive that by a back- ward and forward movement, they would perform the office of teeth and jaws, while the long antennz with their nippers— helped by the other and smaller appendages—held the unfortunate victim in a relentless grasp. And even these smaller limbs, you will see from the figure, had their first joints, near the mouth, provided with toothed edges like a saw. _ With regard to the habits of Sea-scorpions, it would not be altogether safe to conclude that, because in so many ways they resembled king-crabs, they therefore had the same habit of burrowing into the soft muddy or sandy bed of the sea, as some authorities have supposed. Seeing that there is a difference of opinion on this subject, the author consulted Dr. Woodward on the question, and he said he thought it unlikely, seeing that, in some of them, such as the Pterygotus, the eyes are placed on the margin of the head-shield ; for it would hardly care to rub its eyes with sand. Whether it chose at times to bury its long body in the sand by a process of wriggling backwards, as certain modern crustaceans do, we may consider to be an open question. If only Sea-scorpions had not unfortunately died out, how interesting it would be to watch them alive, and to see exactly what use they would make of their long bodies, tail-flaps, and tail-spikes! Were they nocturnal in their habits, wandering about by night, and taking their rest by day? Such questions, we fear, can never be answered. But their large eyes would have been able to collect a great deal of light when the moon and stars feebly illumined the shallower waters of the seas of Old Red Sandstone times ; and so there is nothing to contradict the idea. Now, it is an interesting fact that young crabs, soon after they 32 EXTINCT MONSTERS. are hatched, have long bodies somewhat similar to those of our Sea-scorpions, with a head-shield under which are their jaw-feet, and then a number of free body-rings without any appendages. These end in a spiked tail. As the crab grows older, he ceases to be a free-swimming animal—for which kind of life his long body is well suited,—tucks up his long tail, and takes to crawling instead. Thus his body is rendered more compact and handy for the life he is going to lead. Lobsters, on the other hand, can swim gently forwards, or dart rapidly backwards. ‘Thus we see that the ten-footed crustaceans of the present day are divided into two groups—the long-tailed and free-swimming forms, such as lobsters, shrimps, and cray-fishes; and the short-tailed crawling forms, namely, the crabs. Now, in the same way, Pterygotus and its allies were long-tailed forms, while the king-crabs are short- tailed forms. So were the trilobites of old. Hence we learn that, ages and ages ago, before the days of crabs and lobsters, there were long-tailed and short-tailed forms of crustaceans, just as there are now, only they did not possess true walking legs. They belonged to quite a different order, called ‘‘thigh-mouthed ” crustaceans, Merostomata, because their legs are all placed near the mouth ; and, as we have already learned, were used for feeding as well as for purposes of locomotion. Now, one of the many points of interest in Pterygotus and its allies is that they somewhat resemble the crab in its young or larval state. To a modern naturalist, this fact is important as showing that crustacean forms of life have advanced since the days of the sea-scorpions. Their resemblance to land-scorpions is so close that, if it were not for the important fact that scorpions breathe azr instead of water, and for this purpose are provided with air-tubes (or trachea) such as all insects have, they would certainly be removed bodily out of the crustacean class, and put into that in which scorpions and spiders are placed, viz. the Arachnida. But, in spite of this important difference, there are some naturalists in SEA-SCORPIONS. 33 favour of such a change. It will thus be seen that our name Sea-scorpions is quite permissible. Hugh Miller described some curious little round bodies found with the remains of the Pterygotus, which it was thought were the eggs of these creatures ! Finally, these extinct crustaceans flourished in those ages of the world’s history known as the Silurian and the Old Red Sand- stone periods. As far as we know, they did not survive beyond the succeeding period, known as the Carboniferous.* 1 The student should consult Dr. Henry Woodward’s valuable Monograph of the British Merostomata (Paleontographical Society), to which the writer is much indebted. With regard to the representation of Pterygotus anglicus in Plate I., it has been pointed out by Dr. Woodward that the creature was unable to bend its body into such a position as is shown there. As in a modern lobster, or shrimp, there were certain overlapping plates in the rings, or segments, of the body, which prevented movement from side to side, and only allowed of a vertical movement. CHAPTER III. THE GREAT FISH-LIZARDS. ** Berossus, the Chaldzean saith: A time was when the universe was dark- ness and water, wherein certain animals of frightful and compound forms were generated. There were serpents and other creatures with the mixed shapes of one another, of which pictures are kept in the temple of Belus at Babylon.”— The Archaic Genesis. Vistrors to Sydenham, who have wandered about the spacious gardens so skilfully laid out by the late Sir Joseph Paxton, will be familiar with the great models of extinct animals on the ‘geological island.” These were designed and executed by that clever artist, Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins, who made praiseworthy efforts to picture to our eyes some of the world’s lost creations, as restored by the genius of Sir Richard Owen and other famous naturalists. His drawings of extinct animals may yet be seen hanging on the walls of some of our provincial museums ; and doubtless others still linger among the natural history collections of schools and colleges. Lazily basking in the sun, when it condescends to shine, and resting his clumsy carcase on the ground that forms the shore near the said geological island at Sydenham, may be seen the old fish-lizard, or Ichthyosaurus, that forms the subject of the present chapter. He looks awkward on land, as if longing to get into his native element once more, and cleave its waters with his power- ful tail-fin. His “flippers” seem too weak to enable him to crawl on land. Moreover, the most recent discoveries of Dr. Fraas PHE GREAT FISTELIZARDS. 35 lead us to conclude that the Ichthyosaur never ventured to leave the ‘‘ briny ocean” to bask upon the land. This great uncouth beast presents some curious anomalies in his constitution, being planned on different lines to anything now living, and presenting, as so many other extinct animals do, a mixture, or fusion, of types that greatly puzzled the learned men of the time when his remains were first brought to light, after their long entombment in the Lias rocks forming the cliffs on the coast of Dorset. Some have christened him a ‘‘sea-dragon,” and such indeed he may be considered. But the name Ichthyosaurus, given above, has received the sanction of high authority, and, moreover, serves to remind us of the fact that, although in many respects a lizard, he yet retains in his bony framework the traces of a remote fishy ancestry. So we will call him a fish-lizard. We remember in our young days the amiable endeavours of Mr. ‘‘ Peter Parley” to introduce us to the wonders of creation ; and his account of the Ichthyosaurus particularly impressed itself on our youthful imagination. How surprised that inestimable instructor of youth would be could he now see the still more wonderful remains that have been brought to light from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America! The curious quotation given at the head of the present chapter refers to a widespread belief, prevalent among the highly civilised nations of antiquity, that the world was once inhabited by dragons, or other monsters “of mixed shape” and characters. To the student of ancient history traces of this curious belief will be familiar. Sir Charles Lyell refers to such a belief when he says, in his Principles of Geology, “The Egyptians, it is true, had taught, and the Stoics had repeated, that the earth had once given birth to some monstrous animals that existed no longer.” It may be surprising to some, but it is undoubtedly the fact, that modern scientific truths were partly anticipated by the civilised nations of long ago. Take the ideas cf the ancients as interpreted from the records of Egypt, Chaldza, 36 EXDINCT MONSTERS. India, and China; and you will find that our discoveries in geology, astronomy, and ethnology go far to prove that the traditions of these ancient peoples, however derived, after making due allowance for Oriental allegory and poetic hyperbole, are not far from the truth. To the Babylonian tradition of the monstrous forms of life at first created we have already alluded; but in other fields of discovery we find the same foreshadowing of discoveries made in our own day. Take the vast cycles of Egyptian tradition, wherein the stars returned to their places after a circle of constant change, only to start again on their unwearied round ; the atomic theory of Lucretius, now expanded and incorporated into modern chemistry; or the philosopher’s pregnant saying—Omne vivum ex ovo (“‘ Every living thing comes from an egg”). These and other examples might be cited to show how true the old saying is, “ There is nothing new under the sun.” In the writings of ancient authors may be found singular notices of bones and skeletons found in “the bowels of the earth,” which are referred to an imaginary era of long ago, when giants of huge dimensions walked this earth. One is inclined sometimes to wonder whether the old fables of griffins and horrid dragons may not be to some extent based upon the occasional discovery, in former times, of fossil bones, such as evidently belonged to animals the like of which are not to be seen nowadays. (See chaps. xiii. and xiv.) The illustrious Cuvier, in his day, considered the fish-lizard to be one of the most heteroclite and monstrous animals ever discovered. He said of this creature that it possessed the snout of a dolphin, the teeth of a crocodile, the head and breast-bone of a lizard, the paddles of a whale or dolphin, and the vertebre of a fish! No wonder that naturalists and paleontologists, whose realm is the natural history of the past, were obliged to make a new division, or order, of reptiles to accommodate the fish-lizard. It is obvious that a creature with such very “‘ mixed” relationships would be out of place in any of the four orders into which living reptiles, as represented by turtles, snakes, lizards, and crocodiles are THE GREAT FISH-LIZARDS. a divided. Here is what Professor Blackie says of the Ichthyo- saurus— . ‘“ Behold, a strange monster our wonder engages ! If dolphin or lizard your wit may defy. Some thirty feet long, on the shore of Lyme-Regis, With a saw for a jaw, and a big staring eye. A fish or a lizard? An ichthyosaurus, With a big goggle eye, and a very small brain, And paddles like mill-wheels in chattering chorus, Smiting tremendous the dread-sounding main.” A glance at our restoration, Plate II., will show that the fish- lizard was a powerful monster, well endowed with the means of ‘ propelling itself rapidly through the water as it sought its living prey, to seize it within those cruel jaws. The long and powerful tail was its chief organ of propulsion; but the paddles would also be useful for this purpose, as well as for guiding its course. ‘The pointed head and generally tapering body suggests a capability of rapid movement through the water; and since we know for certain that it fed on fishes, this conclusion is con- firmed, for fishes are not easily caught now, and most probably were not easily caught ages ago. The personal history of the fish-lizard, merely as a fossil or “remain,” is interesting; so much so, that we may perhaps be allowed to relate the circumstances of his début before the scientific world, in the days of the ever-illustrious Cuvier, to whom we have already alluded. But England had its share of illustrious men, too, though lesser lights compared to the founder of comparative anatomy,—such as Sir Richard Owen, on whom the mantle of his friend Cuvier has fallen; Conybeare, De la Beche, and Dean Buckland. These scientific men, aided by the untiring labours of many enthusiastic collectors of organic remains, have been the means of solving the riddle of the fish-lizard, and of introducing him to the public. By this time there is, perhaps, no creature among the host of Antediluvian types better known than this reptile. 38 EXTINCT MONSTERS. The remains of fish-lizards have attracted the attention of collectors and describers of fossils for nearly two centuries past. The vertebree, or ‘‘cup-bones,” as they are often called, of which the spinal column was composed, were figured by Scheiichzer, in an old work entitled Querele Piscium; and, at that time, they were supposed to be the vertebre of fishes. In the year 1814 Sir Everard Home described the fossil remains of this creature, in a paper read before the Royal Society, and published in their Philosophical Transactions. This fossil was first discovered in the Lias strata of the Dorsetshire coast. Other papers followed till the year 1820. We are chiefly indebted to De la Beche and Conybeare for pointing out and illustrating the nature of the fish-lizard ; and that at a time when the materials for so doing were far more scanty than they are now. Mr. Charles Konig, Mr. Thomas Hawkins, Dean Buckland, Sir Philip Egerton, and Professor Owen have all helped to throw light on the structure and habits of these old tyrants of the seas of that age, which is known as the Jurassic period. They lived on, however, to the succeeding or Cretaceous period, during which our English chalk was forming; but the Liassic age was the one in which they flourished most abundantly, and developed the greatest variety. In the year 1814 a few bones were found on the Dorsetshire coast between Charmouth and Lyme-Regis, and added to the collection of Bullock. They came from the Lias cliffs, under- mined by the encroaching sea. Sir Everard’s attention being attracted to them, he published the notices already referred to. The analogy of some of the bones to those of a crocodile, induced Mr. Konig, of the British Museum, to believe the animal to have been a saurian, or lizard ; but the vertebree, and also the position of certain openings in the skull, indicated some remote affinity with fishes, but this must not be pressed too far. The choice of a name, therefore, involved much difficulty ; and at length he decided to call it the Jchthyosaurus, or fish-lizard. Mr. Johnson, of Bristol, who had collected for many years in that THE GREAT FISE-LIZARDS. 39 neighbourhood, found out some valuable particulars about these remains. The conclusions of Dean Buckland, then Professor of Geology at Oxford, led Sir Everard to abandon many of his former conclusions. The labours of the learned men of the day were greatly assisted by the exertions of Miss Anning, an enthusiastic collector of fossils, This lady, devoting herself to science, explored the frowning and precipitous cliffs in the neighbourhood of Lyme-Regis, when the furious spring-tide combined with the tempest to overthrow them, and rescued from destruction by the sea, sometimes at the peril of her life, the few specimens which originated all the facts and speculations of those persons whose names will ever be remembered with gratitude by geologists. Probably our readers are already more or less familiar with the drawings of the fossilised remains of Ichthyosauri to be seen in almost every text-book of geology. (Fig. 3 is from Owen’s British Fossil Reptiles.) But we recommend all who take an interest in the Fic. 3.—/chthyosaurus intermedius. world’s lost creations to pay a visit to the great Natural History Museum, at South Kensington. The fossil reptile gallery contains a magnificent series of Ichthyosauri, about thirty in number. Of these a large number were obtained through the exertions of the late Mr. T. Hawkins, a Somersetshire gentleman, who was a most ardent collector of fossil reptiles, and who devoted himself with great enthusiasm and unsparing energy to the acquisition of a 40 EXTINCT. MONSTERS. truly splendid collection of these most interesting relics of the past. Nearly sixty years ago he arranged for the purchase of his treasures by the authorities of the British Museum, and thus his collection became the property of the nation. His specimens were figured and described by him in two large folio volumes. The first was published in 1834, under the title, Memoirs of the Ichthyosauri and FPlesiosauri; his second, with the same plates, in 1842, under the quaint title of Zhe Book of the Great Sea-Dragons. The large lithographic draw- ings of his fine specimens were beautifully executed by Scharf and O’Neil. The plates are the only really valuable part of these two curious and ill-written books. His descriptions are not of much value, and his pages are encumbered with a vast amount of extraneous matter. The author is immensely proud of his collection, and his vanity is conspicuous throughout. Instead of confining himself to descriptions of what he found, and how he found them, he continually wanders into all sorts of subjects that are, to say the least, irrelevant. In one place he introduces ancient history and mythology; in another, Old Testament chronology; in another, the unbelieving spirit of the age; and here and there indulges in vague unphilosophical speculations. Altogether his two volumes are a curious mixture of bigotry, conceit, and unrestrained fancy, and they afforded to the present writer no small amusement. One rises from the perusal of such men’s writings with a strong sense of the contrast between the humble and patient spirit in which our great men of to-day, such as Professor Owen, study nature and record their observations, and the vague, conceited outpourings of some old-fashioned writers. Mr. Hawkins tells us that his youthful attention was directed to the Lias quarries, near Edgarly, in Somersetshire, in conse- quence of some strange reports. It was said that the bones of giants and infants had, at distant intervals, been found in them. These quarries he visited, and, by offers of generous payment, induced the workmen to keep for him all the remains they might ‘so1oads saljeuis vy ‘249 ‘surpagvcy ‘saysty ‘Jaay fe ynoqe yBua'y] I] ALvig ‘STAISOAINUI] SHANVSOLY} YI] “STUN MLULOD SNANVDSOAYIYIT “SAUVZIT-HSIA THE GREAT FISH-LIZARDS. 41 find. In this way he finally obtained the co-operation of all the quarrymen in the county. Mr. Hawkins thus expresses his delight on obtaining an Ichthyosaurus which was pointed out to him by Miss Anning, near the church at Lyme-Regis, in the year 1832: “ Who can describe my transport at the sight of the colossus? My eyes the first which beheld it! Who shall ever see them lit up with the same unmitigated enthusiasm again? And I verily believe that the uncultivated bosoms of the working men were seized with the same contagious feeling; for they and the surrounding spectators waved their hats to an ‘ Hurra!’ that made hill and mossy dell echoing ring.” This specimen, however, got sadly broken in its fall from the cliff; but in time he put all the pieces together again. Speaking of his own collection, he says, “This stupendous treasure was gathered by me from every part of England; arranged, and its multifarious features elaborated from the hard limestone by my own hands. A tyro in collecting at the age of twelve years, I then boasted of all the antiquities that were come-at-able in my neighbourhood, but, finding that everybody beat my cabinet of coins, I addressed myself to worm-eaten books, and last to fossils.” Before he was twenty years of age he had obtained a very fine collection of organic remains. When, however, he complains of the Philistine dulness and stupidity of quarrymen, who often, in their ignorance, break up finds of almost priceless value, we can fully sympathize. In general contour the body of the fish-lizard was long and tapering, like that of a whale (see Plate II.). It probably showed no distinct neck. The long tail was its chief organ of propulsion. We notice two pairs of fins, or paddles ; one on the fore part of the body, the other on the hinder pari, like the pectoral and abdominal fins of a fish. The skin was scaleless and smooth, or slightly wrinkled, like that of a whale. No traces of scales have ever been found; and if such had existed, they would certainly 42 EXTINCT MONSTERS. have been preserved, since those of fishes and crocodiles of the Jurassic period have been found in considerable number and variety. It is therefore safe to conclude that such were absent in this case. In the Lias strata, at least, the specimens are often preserved with most wonderful completeness (see p- 47). The long and pointed jaws are a striking feature of these animals. The eyes were very large and powerful, and specially adapted, as we shall see presently, to the conditions of their life. It might, perhaps, be asked whether the fish-lizards breathed, like fishes, by means of gills. That question can easily be answered ; for if they had possessed gills for taking in water and breathing the air dissolved therein, they would reveal the fact by showing a bony framework for the support of gills, such as are to be found in all fishes. These structures, known as “ branchial arches,” are absent ; therefore the fish-lizards possessed lungs, and breathed air like reptiles of the present day. Their skulls show where the nostrils were situated ; namely, near the eyes, and not at the end of the upperjaw-bone. There are also passages in the skull leading from the nostrils to the palate, along which currents of air passed on their way to the lungs. Being air-breathers, they would be compelled occasionally to seek the surface of the sea, in order to obtain a fresh supply of the life-giving element—oxygen ; but, being cold-blooded and with a small brain, needing a much less supply of oxygen for its work, the fish-lizards had, like fishes, this advantage over whales, which are warm-blooded—that their stern-propeller, or tail-fin, could take the form best adapted for a swift, straight-forward course through the water. In the whale tribe the tail-fin is horizontal; and this is so on account of their need, as large-brained, warm-blooded air- breathers, of speedy access to the atmospheric air. Were it other- wise, they would not have the means of rising with sufficient rapidity to the surface of the sea; for they have only one pair of fins. But the fish-lizards had two pairs of these appendages, THE GREAT FISH-LIZARDS. 43 and the hinder or pelvic pair no doubt were of great service in helping the creatures to come up to the surface when necessary. Thus we see that the whale, with its one pair of paddles, has a tail specially planned with a view to rapid vertical movement through the water ; while in the fish-lizards, who did not require to breathe so frequently, the tail-fin was planned with a view to swift and straight movement forward as they pursued their prey, and they were compensated by having bestowed upon them an extra pair A B € Fic. 4.—(A) Lateral and (B) profile views of a tooth of J/chthyosaurus platyodon (Conybeare), Lower Lias, Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire. (Cc) Tooth of Ichihyosaurus communis (Conybeare), Lower Lias, Lyme Regis, Dorset. of paddles. Thus we learn how one part of an animal is related to and dependent upon another, and how they all work together with the greatest harmony for certain definite purposes (see p.'@): These great marine predaceous reptiles literally swarmed in the seas of the Lias period, and no doubt devoured immense 44 EXTINCT MONSTERS. shoals of the fishes of those times, whose numbers were thus to some extent kept down. There is clear proof of this in the fossilised droppings—known as “coprolites,’—which show on examination the broken and comminuted remains of the little bony plates of ganoid fishes that we know were contemporaries of these reptiles. Probably young ones were sometimes devoured too. It was in the period of the Lias that fish-lizards attained to their greatest development, both in numbers and variety; and the strata of that period have preserved some interesting variations. It will be sufficient here to point out two, namely, Ichthyosaurus tenuirostris—an elegant little form, in which the jaws, instead of being massive and strong, were long and slender like a bird’s beak ; and also Ichthyosaurus latifrons (Fig. 5), with jaws still more Fic. 5.—Skull of Lehthyosaurus latifrons. birdlike. Our artist has attempted to show the former variety in our illustration (Plate II.). A most perfect example of this pretty little Ichthyosaur, from the Lower Lias of Street in Somerset, has recently been presented to the National Collection at South Kensington by Mr. Alfred Gillett, of Street, and may be seen there. In this group of fish-lizards the eyes are relatively larger, and we should imagine that they were very quick in detecting and catching their prey ; their paddles also have larger bones. There is a remarkably fine specimen at Burlington House, in the rooms of the Geological Society, of an Ichthyosaurus’ head, which the writer found, on measuring, to be about five feet six inches long. A cast of this head is exhibited at South Kensington. The largest of the specimens in the National Collection is twenty- two feet long and eight feet across the expanded paddles ; but it THE GREAT FPISE-LIZARDS. 45 is known that many attained much greater dimensions. Judging from detached heads and parts of skeletons, it is probable that some of them were between thirty and forty feet long. A specimen of Ichthyosaurus platyodon in the collection of the late Mr. Johnson, of Bristol, has an eye-cavity with a diameter of fourteen inches. ‘This collection is now dispersed. With regard to their habits, Sir Richard Owen concludes that they occasionally sought the shores, crawled on the strand, and basked in the sunshine. His reason for this conjecture (which, however, is not confirmed by Dr. Fraas’s recent discoveries) is to be found in the bony structure connected with the fore-paddles, which is not to be found in any porpoise, dolphin, grampus, or whale, and for want of which these creatures are so helpless when left high and dry on the shore.* The structure in question is a strong bony arch, inverted and spanning across beneath the chest from one shoulder to the other. A fish-lizard, when so visiting the shore for sleep, or in the breeding season, would lie or crawl, prostrate, with its under side resting or dragging on the ground— somewhat after the manner of a turtle. It is a curious fact that this bony arch resembles the same part in those singular and problematical mammals, the Echidna and the Platypus, or duck-mole. The enormous magnitude and peculiar construction of the eye are highly interesting features. The expanded pupil must have allowed of the admittance of a large quantity of light, so that the creature possessed great powers of vision. The organic remains associated with fish-lizards tell us that they inhabited waters of moderate depth, such as prevails near a coast-line or among coral islands. Moreover, an air-breathing creature would obviously be unable to live in “‘the depths of the 1 It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to remark that whales are not fishes, but mammals which have undergone great change in order to adapt themselves to a marine life. Their hind limbs have practically vanished, only a rudiment of them being left. 46 EXTINCT MONSTERS. sea ;” for it would take a long time to get to the surface fora fresh supply of air. Perhaps no part of the skeleton is more interesting than the curious circular series of bony plates surrounding the iris and pupil of the eye. The eyes of many fishes are defended by a bony covering consisting of two pieces ; but a circle of bony overlapping plates is now only found in the eyes of turtles, tortoises, lizards, and birds, and some alligators. This elaborate apparatus must have been of some special use; the question is—What service or services did it perform? Here, again, we find answers suggested by Owen and Buckland. It would aid, they say, in protecting the eye-ball from the waves of the sea when the creature rose to the surface, as well as from the pressure of the water when it dived down to the bottom—for even at a slight depth pressure in- creases, as divers know. But it appears that the ring of bony plates fulfilled a yet more important office, thereby enabling the fish-lizards to play admirably their part in the world in which they lived, and to succeed in the struggle of life; for even in those remote days there must have been, as now, a keen competi- tion among all animals, so that the victory was to those that were best equipped. Would it not be an advantage for them to have the power of seeing their finny prey whether near or far? Certainly it would; and so we are told that, by bringing the plates a little nearer together, and causing them to press gently on the eye-ball, so as to make the eye more convex—that is, bulging out—a nearer object would be the better discerned. On the other hand, by relaxing this pressure, thus enlarging the aperture of the pupil and diminishing the convexity, a distant object would be focussed upon the retina. In this manner some birds alter the focus of their eyes while swooping down on their prey. What a wonderful arrangement! We often hear of people having two pairs of spectacles—with lenses of different curvature—one for reading, and the other for seeing more distant objects than a THE GREAT FISH-LIZARDS. 47 book held in the hand. But here is a creature that possessed an apparatus far more simple and effective than that supplied by the optician! Dr. Buckland, speaking of these “sclerotic plates,” as they are called, says they show ‘‘that the enormous eye of which they formed the front was an optical instrument of varied and prodigious power, enabling the Ichthyosaurus to descry its prey in the obscurity of night and in the depths of the sea.” But the last expression must be taken in a limited sense (see Fig. 6). Fic. 6.—Head of /ehthyosaurus platyodon. It might well be supposed that no record had been preserved from which we could learn anything about the nature of the skin of our fish-lizard ; but even this wish has been partly fulfilled, to the delight of all geologists. Certain specimens have been obtained, from the Lias of England and Germany, that show faithful impressions of the skin that covered the paddles. A specimen of this nature has lately been presented to the national treasure-house at South Kensington by Mr. Montague Brown. On the inner side of the paddle was a broad fin-like expan- sion, admirably adapted to obtain the full advantage of the stroke of the limb in swimming.? Speaking of the limbs, it should be mentioned that the bones of each finger, instead of being elongated and limited in number to three in each of the five fingers, are polygonal in shape and * Mr. Smith Woodward informs the writer that specimens have lately been found near Wiirtemberg, with evidence of a triangular fin on the back. Plate II. has been redrawn for this edition, to make it more in harmony with Dr. Fraas’s discoveries. (See Appendix V.) 48 EXTINCT MONSTERS. arranged in as many as seven or eight rows, while those of each finger are exceedingly numerous. Thus the whole structure forms a kind of bony pavement which must have been very supple. Such a limb would be one of the most efficient and powerful swimming organs known in the whole animal kingdom. In whales the fingers of the flippers are of the usual number, namely, five. Some species of fish-lizards had as many as over a hundred separate little bones in the fore-paddle. Another question naturally suggests itself: Were they viviparous, or did they lay eggs like crocodiles? This question seems to have been answered in favour of the first supposition ; and in the following interesting manner. It not infrequently happens that entire little skeletons of very small individuals are found under the ribs of large ones. They are invariably uninjured, and of the same species as the one that encloses them, and with the head pointing in one direction. Such specimens are most probably the fossilised remains of little fish-lizards, that were yet unborn when their mothers met with an untimely end (see p. 51). In some cases, however, they may be young ones that were swallowed. (See Appendix V.) The jaws of these hungry formidable monsters were provided with a series of formidable teeth—sometimes over two hundred in number—inserted in a long groove, and not in distinct sockets, as in the case of crocodiles. In some cases, sixty or more have been found on each side of the upper and lower jaws, giving a total of over two hundred and forty teeth! The larger teeth may be two inches or more in length. The jaws were admirably constructed on a plan that combined lightness, elasticity, and strength. Instead of consisting of one piece only, they show a union of plates of bone, as in recent crocodiles. These plates are strongest and most numerous just where the greatest strength was wanted, and thinner and fewer towards the extremities of the jaw. A crocodile, Sir Samuel Baker says, in his Wild Beasts and ther Ways, can bite a man in THE GREAT. FISH-LIZARDS. 49 two; and no doubt our fish-lizard would have been glad to perform the same feat! But in his pre-Adamite days the oppor- tunity did not present itself. The spinal column, or backbone, with its generally concave vertebrze, must have been highly flexible, as is that of a fish, especially the long tail which the creature worked rapidly from side to side as it lashed the waters. The hollows of these concave vertebre must have been originally filled up with fluid forming an elastic bag, or capsule. To get a clearer idea of this, take a small portion of the back- bone of a boiled cod, or other “bony” fish, and you will see on pulling it to pieces, the white, jelly-like substance that fills up the hollows between the vertebre. In this way Nature provides a soft cushion between the joints, that allows of a certain amount of movement, while, at the same time, the column holds together. The backbone of a fish may not inaptly be compared to a railway train. Each of the carriages represents a vertebra, and the buffers act as cushions when the train is bent in running round a curve. After all, we must learn from Nature; and many of the greatest mechanical and engineering triumphs of to-day are based upon the methods used by Nature in the building up and equipment of vegetable and animal forms of life. It may, perhaps, be inquired whether there is any evidence for the existence of a tail-fin, such as is shown in our illustration. To this it may be replied that the presence of such an appendage is as good as proved by a certain flattening of the vertebrz at the end of the tail, detected by Owen. The direction of this flattening is from side to side, and therefore the tail-fin must have been vertical, like that of a fish. In one specimen Sir Richard Owen has detected as many as 156 vertebra to the whole body. Our description of the fish-lizard has, we trust, been sufficilent— E 50 EXTINCT MONSTERS. although not couched in the language used by men of science—to give a fair idea of its structure and habits. In conclusion, a few words may be said about the ancestry and life-history of these ancient monsters. Palontologists have good reason to believe that they were descended from some early form of land reptile. Ifso, they show that whales are not the first land animals that have gone back to the sea, from which so many forms of life have taken their rise. During the long Mesozoic period fish-lizards played the part that whales now play in the economy of the world; and they resembled the latter, not only in general shape, but in the situation of the nostrils (near the eye), and in their teeth and long jaws. But these curious resemblances must not be interpreted to mean that whales and fish-lizards are related to each other. They only show that similar modes of life tend to produce artificial re- semblances—just as some whales, in their turn, show a superficial resemblance to fishes. With regard to the particular form of me from which the fish-lizard may have been derived, no certain conclusion has at present been arrived at. ‘This is chiefly from want of fuller knowledge of early forms, such as may have existed in the previous periods known as the Carboniferous and Trias (see Appendix I.). But there are certain features in the skulls, teeth, and vertebree that suggest a relationship with the Labyrinthodonts, or primeval salamanders that flourished during the above periods, or at least from amphibians more or less closely allied to them. They can- not by any possibility be regarded as modified fishes ; for fishes have gills instead of lungs. The fish-lizards played their part, and played it admirably ; but their days were numbered, and the place they occupied has since been taken by a higher type—the mammal. As reptiles, they were eminently a success; but, then, they were only reptiles, and therefore were at last left behind in the struggle for existence, until finally they died out, at the end of the Cretaceous period, THE GREAT FISH-LIZARDS. 51 when certain important geographical and other changes took place, helping to cause the extinction of many other strange forms of life, as we shall see later on (see p. 147). They had a wide geographical range; for their remains have been discovered in Arctic regions, in Europe, India, Ceram, North America, the east coast of Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In American deposits they are represented by certain toothless forms, to which the name Sauranodon (“toothless lizard”) has been given. These have been discovered by Professor Marsh, in the Jurassic strata of the Rocky Mountains.. They were eight or nine feet long, and in every other respect resembled Ichthyosaurs. As we have endeavoured to indicate in our illustration, the fish- lizards flourished in seas wherein animal, and doubtless vegetable life was very abundant. Any one who has collected fossils from the Lias of England will have found how full it is of beautiful organic remains, such as corals, mollusca, encrinites, sea-urchins, and other echinoids, fishes, etc. The climate of this period in Europe was mild and genial, or even semi-tropical. Coral reefs and coral islands varied the landscape. ‘There is just one more point of interest that ought not to be omitted ; it refers to the manner in which these reptiles of the Lias age met their deaths, and were thus buried up in their rocky tombs. Sir Charles Lyell and other writers point out that the individuals found in those strata must have met with a sudden death and quick burial; for if their uncovered bodies had been left, even for a few hours, exposed to putrification and the attacks of fishes at the bottom of the sea, we should not now find their remains so completely preserved that often scarcely a single bone has been moved from its right place. What was the exact nature of this operation is at present a matter of doubt. CHAPTER IV. THE GREAT SEA-LIZARDS AND THEIR ALLIES. **The wonders of geology exercise every faculty of the mind—reason, memory, imagination ; and though we cannot put our fossils to the question, it is something to be so aroused as to be made to put the questions to one’s self.” —HuGuH MILLER. THE fish-lizards, described in our last chapter, were not the only predaceous monsters that haunted the seas of the great Mesozoic age, or era. We must now say a few words about certain con- temporary creatures that shared with them the spoils of those old seas, so teeming with life. And first among these—as being more fully known—come the long-necked sea-lizards, or Plesio- saurs. The Plesiosaurus was first discovered in the Lias rocks of Lyme-Regis, in the year 1821. It was christened by the above name, and introduced to the scientific world by the Rev. Mr. Conybeare (afterwards Dean of Llandaff) and Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) de la Beche. They gave it this name in order to distinguish it from the Ichthyosaurus, and to record the fact that it was more nearly allied to the lizard than the latter.t Cony- beare, with the assistance of De la Beche, first described it in a now-classic paper read before the Geological Society of London, and published in the Zvansactions of that Society in the year 1821. In a later paper (1824) he gave a restoration ’ The name is derived from two Greek words—f/eszos, near, or allied to, and sauros, a lizard, THE GREAT SEA-LIZARDS AND THEIR ALLIES. 53 of the entire skeleton of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus; and the accuracy of that restoration is still universally acknowledged. This fine specimen was in the possession of the Duke of Buckingham, who kindly placed it at the disposal of Dr. Buckland, for a time, that it might be properly described and investigated. A glance at our illustration, Plate III., will show that this strange creature was not inaptly compared at the time to a snake threaded through the body of a turtle. Dr. Buckland truly observes that the discovery of this genus forms one of the most important additions that geology has made to comparative anatomy. ‘It is of the Plesiosaurus,” says that graphic author, in his Bridgewater Treatise, ‘that Cuvier asserts the structure to have been the most heteroclite, and its characters altogether the most monstrous that have been yet found amid the ruins of a former world. To the head of a lizard it united the teeth of a crocodile; a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a serpent; a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped ; the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a whale! Such are the strange combinations of form and structure in the Plesiosaurus—a genus, the remains of which, after interment for thousands of years amidst the wreck of millions of extinct inhabitants of the ancient earth, are at length recalled to light by the researches of the geologist, and submitted to our examination in nearly as perfect a state as the bones of species that are now existing upon the earth.” Perhaps the best way in which we can gain a clear idea of the general characters of a long-necked sea-lizard, as we may call our Plesiosaurus, is by comparing it with the fish-lizard, described in the last chapter. Its long neck and small head are the most conspicuous features. Then we notice the short tail. But if we compare the paddles of these two extinct forms of life, we notice at once certain important differences. In the fish-lizard the bone of the arm was very short, while all the bones of the fore-arm 54 EXTINCT MONSTERS. and fingers were modified into little many-sided bodies, and so articulated together as to make the whole limb, or paddle, a solid yet flexible structure. In the long-necked sea-lizard, however, we find a long arm-bone with a club-like shape; and the two bones of the fore-arm are seen to be longer than in the fish-lizard. But a still greater difference shows itself in the bones of the finger, as we look at a fossilised skeleton (or a drawing of one); for the fingers are long and slender, like those of ordinary reptiles. There are only five fingers, and each finger is quite distinct from the others. This is the reason why the Plesiosaur was considered to depart less from the type of an ordinary reptile, and so re- ceived its name. Other remarkable differences present themselves in the shoulders and haunches, but these need not be considered here. The species shown in Fig. 8 had rather a large head. It is obvious that such a long slender neck as these creatures had could not have supported a large head, like that of the fish- lizard. Consequently, we find a striking contrast in the skulls of the two forms. That of the Plesiosaur was short and stout, and therefore such as could easily be supported, as well as rapidly moved about by the long slender neck. Thus we find another simple illustration of the “law of correlation,” alluded to on p. 6. The teeth were set in distinct sockets, as they are in crocodiles, to which animals there are also points of resemblance, in the backbone, ribs, and skull. Fig. 7 shows three different types of lower jaws of Plesiosaurs. The one marked C belongs to Plesiosaurus dolichodirus, the species represented in our plate. There were no bony plates in the eye. Professor Owen thinks that they were long-lived. The skin was probably smooth, like that of a porpoise. The visitor to the geological collection at South Kensington will find a splendid series of the fossilised remains of long-necked sea-lizards. They were mostly obtained from the Lias formation of Street in Somersetshire, Lyme-Regis in Dorset, and Whitby in Yorkshire. Those from the Lias are mostly small, about eight "Jooy Zz YIBuIT = *swazapoyr1jop snanwsorsat yf ‘III Ftv1g “ALINNATAH YO HSIA-AILLAS ‘GUVZIT-VAS GAMOAN-DNOT “STALOVOOUALd THE GREAT SEA-LIZARDS AND THEIR ALLIES. 55 to ten feet in length. But in the rocks of the Cretaceous period, which was later, are found larger specimens. There is a cast of a very fine specimen from the Upper Lias on the wall of the east corridor (No. 3 on Plan) of the geological galleries at South ——— 1D) a. Si ‘| iS a2) 'S 12) o —_— @ oo —_ oo2° o Fic. 7.—Mandibles of Fish-lizards. Aa, Feloneustes philarchus (Seeley) ; from the Oxford Clay. 3B, Thaumatosaurus indicus (Lydekker); Upper Jurassic of India. c, Plestosaurus dolichodirus (Conybeare) ; from the Lower Lias, Lyme Regis. Kensington, which is twenty-two feet long. But some of the Cretaceous forms, both in Europe and America, attained a length of forty feet, and had vertebre six inches in diameter. The bodies of the vertebrze, or “ cup-bones,” are either flat or slightly 56 EXTINCT MONSTERS. concave, showing that the backbone as a whole was less flexible than in the fish-lizards. It may be mentioned here that Mr. Smith Woodward, of the Natural History Museum, recently showed the writer a fossil Plesiosaur that is being set up in the formatore’s shop, in the same manner that a recent skeleton might be. In this, and many Fic. 8.—Plesiosaurus macrocephalus. other ways, the guardians of the national treasure-house are endeavouring to make the collection intelligible and interest- ing to the general public. Specimens of extinct animals thus set up, give one a much better idea than when the bones are all lying huddled together on a slab of rock. But it is not always possible to get the bones entirely out of their rocky bed, or matrix. THE GREAT SEA-LIZARDS AND THEIR ALLIES. 37 Great credit is due to Mr. Alfred N. Leeds, of Eyebury, who has disinterred the separate bones of many distinct skeletons of Plesiosaurs from Oxford Clay strata near Peterborough. It will be remembered that the long and powerful tail of the fish-lizard was its principal organ of propulsion through the water; and that, consequently, the paddles only played a secondary part. They were small, but amply large enough for the work they had to perform. But our long-necked sea-lizards possessed very short tails. What, then, was the consequence ? Obviously that the paddles had all the more work to do. ‘They were the chief swimming organs. The vertebre of this short tail show that it probably was highly flexible, and could move rapidly from side to side; but, for all that, its use as a propeller would not be of much importance. We see now why the paddles are so long and powerful, like two pairs of great oars, one pair on each side of the body. In a fossil skeleton you will notice the flattened shape of the arm-bone (or humerus), and of the thigh- bone (or femur). This gave breadth to the paddles, and made them more efficient as swimming organs. They give no indica- tion of having carried even such impertect claws as those of turtles and seals, and therefore we may conclude that the Plesio- saur was far more at home in the water than on land, and it seems probable that progression on land was impossible. The tail was probably useful as a rudder, to steer the animal when swimming on the surface, and to elevate or depress it in ascending and descending through the water. Like the fish- lizard, this creature was an air-breather, and therefore was obliged occasionally to visit the surface for fresh supplies of air. But probably it possessed the power of compressing air within its lungs, so that the frequency of its visits to the surface would not be very great. From the long neck and head, situated so far away from the paddles, as well as for other reasons, it may be concluded that this creature was a rapid swimmer, as was the Ichthyosaurus. 58 EXTINCT MONSTERS. Although of considerable size, it probably had to seek its food, as well as its safety, chiefly by artifice and concealment. The fish- lizard, its contemporary, must have been a formidable rival and a dangerous enemy, whom to attack would be unadvisable. Speaking of the habits of the long-necked sea-lizard, Mr. Cony- beare, in his second paper, already alluded to, says, ‘ That it was aquatic, is evident from the form of its paddles; that it was marine, is almost equally so, from the remains with which it is uni- versally associated ; that it may occasionally have visited the shore, the resemblance of its extremities to those of the turtle may lead us to conjecture; its motion, however, must have been very awkward on land ; its long neck must have impeded its progress through the water, presenting a striking contrast to the organisa- tion which so admirably fits the Ichthyosaurus to cut through the waves. “May it not therefore be concluded (since, in addition to these circumstances, its respiration must have required frequent access of air) that it swam upon or near the surface, arching back its long neck like the swan, occasionally darting it down at the fish which happened to float within its reach? It may, perhaps, have lurked in shoal-water along the coast, concealed among the sea- weed, and, raising its nostrils to a level with the surface from a considerable depth, may have found a secure retreat from the assaults of dangerous enemies ; while the length and flexibility of its neck may have compensated for the want of strength in its jaws and its incapacity for swift motion through the water, by the suddenness and agility of the attack which they enabled it to make on every animal fitted for its prey, which came within its extensive sweep.” More than twenty species of long-necked sea-lizards are known to geologists. Professor Owen, in his great work on Svitish Fossil Reptiles, when describing the huge Plesiosaurus dolichodirus from Dorset, suggests that the carcase of this monster, after it sank to the THE GREAT SEA-LIZARDS AND THEIR ALLIES. 59 bottom of the sea, was preyed upon by some carnivorous animal (perhaps sharks). It seems, he says, as if a bite of the neck had pulled out of place the eighth to the twelfth vertebrae. Those at the base of the neck are scattered and dispersed as if through more “tugging and riving.” So with regard to its body, pro- bably some hungry creature had a grip of the spine near the middle of the back, and pulled all the succeeding vertebre in the region of the hind limbs. ‘Thus we get a little glimpse of scenes of violence that took place at the bottom of the bright sunny seas of the period when the clays and limestones of the Lias rocks were being deposited in the region of Lyme-Regis. As time went on, these curious reptiles increased in size, until, in the period when our English chalk was being formed (Creta- ceous period), they reached their highest point (see p. 147). After that they became extinct—whether slowly or somewhat suddenly we cannot tell. Until more is known of the ancient life of the earth, it will not be possible to say with certainty what were the nearest relations _ Of the long-necked sea-lizards. They first appear in the strata of the New Red Sandstone, which is below the Lias. Certain little reptiles, about three feet long, from the former rocks, known as Neusticosaurus and Larlosaurus, seem to be rather closely related to the creatures we are now considering, and to connect them with another group, namely, the Pliosaurs. They were partly terrestrial and partly aquatic; but it is not easy to say whether their limbs had been converted into true paddles or not. At any rate, there is every reason to believe that the long-necked sea-lizards were descended from an earlier form of land reptile. They gradually underwent considerable modifications, in order to adapt themselves to an aquatic life. We noticed that the same conclusion has been arrived at with regard to the fish-lizards. Both these extinct groups, therefore, present an interesting analogy to whales, which are now considered to have been derived, by a like series of changes, from mammals that once walked the earth. 60 EXTINCT MONSTERS. The Plesiosaur presents, on the one hand, points of resem- blance to turtles and lizards,—on the other hand, to crocodiles, whales, and, according to some authorities, even the strange Ornithorhynchus. But it will be very long before its ancestry can be made known. In the mean time, we must put it in a place somewhere near the fish-lizards, and leave posterity to complete what has at present only been begun. It must, however, be borne in mind that some of the above resemblances are purely accidental, and not such as point to relationship. Because their flippers are like those of a whale, it does not mean that Plesiosaurs are related to modern whales. It only means that similar habits tend to produce accidental resemblances — just as the whales and porpoises, in their turn, resemble fishes. To make torpedoes go rapidly through the water, inventors have given them a fish-like shape ;—in the same way the early forms of mammals, from which whales are descended, gradually adapted themselves to a life in the water, and so became modified to some extent to the shapes of fishes. The Pliosaurs, above mentioned, are evidently relations, but with short necks instead of long ones. They had enormous heads and thick necks. Fine specimens of their huge jaws, paddle-bones, etc., may be seen at the end of the reptile-gallery at Cromwell Road. One of the skulls exhibited there is nearly six feet long, while a hind paddle measures upwards of six and a half feet in length, of which thirty-seven inches is taken up by the thigh-bone alone. The teeth at the end of the jaws are truly enormous. One tooth, from a deposit known as the Kimmeridge Clay, is nearly a foot long from the tip of the crown to the base of the root. In some, the two jaw-bones of the lower jaw are partly united, as in the sperm-whale or cachalot. Creatures so armed must have been very destructive. CHAPTER V. THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS. ‘¢ What we know is but little; what we do not know is immense.”—LA PLACE. Was there ever an age of dragons? ‘Tradition says there was ; but there is every reason to believe that the fierce and blood- thirsty creatures, of which such a variety present themselves, are but creations of the imagination,—useful in their way, no doubt, as pointing a moral or adorning a tale, but, nevertheless, wholly without foundation in fact. The dragon figures in the earliest traditions of the human race, and crops up again in full force in European medieval or even late romance. In ancient Egyptian mythology, Horus, the son of Isis, slays the evil dragon. In Greece, the infant Hercules, while yet in his cradle, strangles deadly snakes; and Perseus, after engaging in fierce struggle with the sea-monster, slays it, and rescues Andro- meda from a cruel death. In England, we have the heroic legend of St. George and the Dragon depicted on oursovereigns. But it is easy to see a common purpose running through these legends. They are considered by many to be solar myths, and havea moral purpose. The dragons or snakes are emblems of darkness and evil ; the heroes emblems of light, and so of good. The triumph of good over evil is the theme they were intended to illustrate. The dragons, then, are clearly products of the imagination, based, no doubt, on the huge and uncouth reptiles of the present human era, such as crocodiles, pythons, and such creatures. 62 EXTINCT MONSTERS. Amidst much diversity there is yet a strange similarity in the dragons that figure in the folk-lore of Eastern and Western peoples. Probably our European traditions were brought by the tribes which, wave after wave, poured in from Central Asia. They are, for the most part, unnatural beasts, breathing out fire, and often endowed with wings, while at the same time possessing limbs ending in cruel claws, fitted for clutching their unfortunate victims. ‘The wings seem, to say the least, very much in the way. Poisonous fangs, claws, scaly armour, and a long pointed tail were all very well,—but wings are hardly wanted, unless to add one more element of mystery or terror. Some, however, are devoid of wings: the Imperial Japanese dragons showing no sign of such appendages. The Temple Bar griffin is a grim example of a winged monster. Nevertheless, in spite of all the manifest absurdities of the dragons of various nations and times, geology reveals to us that there once lived upon this earth reptiles so great and uncouth that we can think of no other but the time-honoured word “ dragon” to convey briefly the slightest idea of their monstrous forms and characters. So there is some truth in dragons, after all. But then we must make this important reservation—viz. that the days of these dragons were long before the human period; they flourished in one of those dim geological ages of which the rocks around us bear ample records. It is a strange fact that human fancy should have, in some cases at least, created monsters not very unlike some of those antediluvian animals that have, during the present century, been discovered in various parts of Europe and America. Some unreasonable persons will have it that certain monstrous reptiles of the Mesozoic era, about to be described, must have somehow managed to survive into the human period, and so have suggested to early races of men the dragons to which we have alluded. But there is no need for this untenable supposition. By a free blending together of ideas culled from living types of animals it THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS. 63 would be very easy to construct no small variety of dragons; and sO we may believe this is what the ancients did. Having said so much of dragons in general, let us proceed to consider those both possible and real monsters revealed of late years by the researches of geologists. For this purpose we shall devote the present and two following chapters to the consideration of a great and wonderful group of fossil reptiles known as Dinosaurs. The strdnge fish-lizards and sea-lizards previously described were the geological contemporaries of a host of reptiles, now mostly extinct, which inhabited both the lands and waters of those periods known as the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cre- taceous, which taken together represent the great Mesozoic, formerly called the Secondary, era. The announcement by Baron Cuvier—the illustrious founder of Palzontology—that there was a period when our planet was inhabited by reptiles of appalling magnitude, with many of the features of modern quadrupeds, was of so novel and startling a character as to require the prestige of even his name to obtain for it any degree of credence. But subsequent discoveries have fully confirmed the truth of his belief, and the “ age of reptiles ” is no longer considered fabulous. This expression was first used by Dr. Mantell as the title of a paper published in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1831, and serves to remind us that reptilian forms of life were once the ruling class among animals, The Dinosaurs are an extinct order comprising the largest terrestrial and semi-aquatic reptiles that ever lived; and while some of them in a general way resembled crocodiles, others show in the bony structures they have left behind a very remarkable and interesting resemblance to birds of the ostrich tribe. This resemblance shows itself in the pelvis, or bony arch with which the hind limbs are connected in vertebrate or back-boned animals, and in the limbs themselves. This curious fact, first brought into notice by Professor Huxley, has been variously interpreted 64 EXTINCT MONSTERS. by anatomists; some concluding, with Professor Huxley, that birds are descended from Dinosaurs ; while others, with Professor Owen, consider the resemblance accidental, and in no way implying relationship. Huxley has proposed the name Ornitho- scelida, or bird-legged, for these remarkable reptiles. Dinosaurs must have formerly inhabited a large part of the primeval world; for their remains are found, not only in Europe, but in Africa, India, America, and even in Australia; and the geologist finds that they reigned supreme on the earth throughout the whole of the great Mesozoic era. Their bodies were, in some cases, defended by a formidable coat of armour, consisting of bony plates and spines, as illustrated by the case of Scelidosaurus (p. 105), thus giving them a decidedly dragon-like appearance. ‘The vertebre, or bony seg- ments of the back-bone, generally have their centra hollow on both sides, as in the Ichthyosaurus ; but in the neck and tail they are not unfrequently hollow on one side and convex on the other. In some of the largest forms the vertebre are excavated into hollow chambers. This is apparently for the sake of lightness; for a very large animal with heavy solid bones would find it difficult to move freely. In this way strength was combined with lightness. All the Dinosaurs had four limbs, and in many cases the hind pair were very large compared to the fore limbs. They varied enormously in size, as well as in appearance. ‘Thus certain of the smaller families were only two feet long and lightly built ; while others were truly colossal in size, far out-rivalling our modern rhinoceroses and elephants. The limbs of Cetiosaurus, for example, or of Stegosaurus, remind us strikingly of those of elephants. The celebrated Von Meyer was so struck with this likeness that he proposed the name Pachypoda for them, which means thick-footed. Professor Owen opposed this name; for it was misleading, and only applied to a few ofthem. He therefore proposed the name we have already THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSA URS. 65 been using, viz. Dinosauria,! and this name has been generally retained. We are thus led to connect them with lizards and crocodiles, rather than with birds or quadrupeds. ‘The strange and curiously mixed characters of the old-fashioned reptiles is forcibly illustrated by these differences of opinion among leading naturalists. Professor Seeley, another living authority, refuses to consider them as reptiles, at least in the ordinary sense of the word. Extinct forms of life are often so very different to the creatures inhabiting the world of to-day, that naturalists find it a hard task to assign them their places in the animal kingdom. The classes, orders, and families under which living forms are grouped are often found inadequate for the purpose, so much so that new orders and new families require to be made for them; and then it is often quite impossible to determine the relations of these new groups to the old ones we are accustomed to. Dinosaurs offer a good example of this difficulty. Were they related to ancient crocodiles? Noone can say for certain; but it is quite possible, and even probable. Again, did certain long-legged Dinosaurs eventually give rise by evolution to the running birds, ostriches, emeus, etc.? This, although supported by weighty authority, is a matter of speculation : we ought to be very careful in accepting such conclusions. It may perhaps be safer to look upon the ancestry of birds as one of those problems on which the oracle of science cannot at present declare itself. Various attempts have been made to classify Dinosaurs, and arrange them in family groups; but, considering our imperfect knowledge, it will be wise to regard all such attempts as purely temporary and provisional, although in some ways convenient. Professor Marsh, of Yale College, U.S., whose wonderful discoveries in the far West have attracted universal attention, has grouped the Dinosaurs into five sub-orders. It will, however, be sufficient for our purpose if we follow certain English authorities who ' Greek—deinos, terrible ; sauros, lizard. 66 | EXTINCT MONSTERS. divide them into three groups—taking the names given by Pro- fessor Marsh, only running together some which he would separate. We shall first consider the very interesting and huge forms in- cluded in his sub-order the Sauropoda, or lizard-footed Dinosaurs. Various parts of the skeletons, such as vertebrz, leg-bones, etc., of these cumbrous beasts have long been known in this country ; but Professor Marsh was the first person to discover a complete skeleton. We shall, therefore, now turn our attention to the bony frame- work of the huge Brontosaurus (Fig. 9), a vegetable-feeding lizard. But it will be necessary to completely lay aside all our previous notions taken from lizards of the present day, with their short legs and snake-like scaly bodies, before we can come to any fair conclusion with regard to this monstrous beast. It was nearly sixty feet long, and probably when alive weighed more than twenty tons! that it was a stupid, slow-moving reptile, may be inferred from its very small brain and slender spinal cord. By taking casts of the brain-cavities in the skulls of extinct animals, anatomists can obtain a very good idea of the nature and capacity of their brains ; and in this way important evidence is obtained, and such as helps to throw light upon their habits and general intelligence. No bony plates or spines have been discovered with the remains of this monster ; so that we are driven to conclude that it was wholly without armour : and, more- over, there seem to be no signs of offensive weapons of any kind. Professor Marsh concludes that it was more or less amphibious in its habits, and that it fed upon aquatic plants and other succulent vegetation. Its remains, he says, are generally found in localities where the animal had evidently become mired, just as cattle at the present day sometimes become hopelessly fixed in a swampy place on the margin of a lake or river (see p. 19). Each track made by the creature in walking occupied one square yard in extent! THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS. 67 (-ysrepy 1217) "SS]9IXA SNANVSOJUOLT JO UOJIYS pI10jsoy— "6 ‘OT v aS R = Sola SOAS 68 EXTINCT MONSTERS. The remarkably small head is one of the most striking features of this Dinosaur, and presents a curious contrast to the large and formidable skulls possessed by some other forms to be described further on. But it is clear that no animal with such a long neck as this creature had could have borne the weight of a heavy skull. Short thick necks and heavy skulls always go together. Indeed, the weight of the long neck itself would have been serious had it not been for the fact that the vertebree in this part of the skeleton, and as far as the region of the tail, have large cavities in the sides of Fic. 10.—Neck vertebre of Brontosaurus. 1. Front view. 2. Back view. the centra. This cavernous structure of the vertebre gradually decreases towards the tail. The cavities communicated with a series of internal cavities which give a kind of honeycombed structure to the whole vertebra. This arrangement affords a combination of strength and lightness in the massive supports required for the huge ribs, limbs, and muscles, such as could not have been provided by any other plan. (See Fig. ro.) The body of the Brontosaur was comparatively short, with a fairly large paunch (see restoration, Plate IV.). The legs and feet were ~ *yooy Og Ajreou yIZuI'y] : "AI FLV Ig "SOSITHOXA SAUMAVSOLNOUA SAUNVSONIG OILNVOIO V Hy Viti THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS. 69 strong and massive, and the limb-bones solid. Asif partly in order to balance the neck, we find a long and powerful tail, in which the vertebre are nearly all solid. In most Dinosaurs the fore limbs are small compared to the hind limbs—e.g. Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Scelidosaurus,—but here we find them unusually large. In this case, then, it is hardly possible that the creature walked upon its hind legs, as many of the Dinosaurs did. But, at the same time, we may believe that occasionally it assumed a more erect position; and may not the light hollowed structure of the vertebre in the fore part of the body, already alluded to, have imparted such lightness as made it possible for the creature to assume such attitudes? There can be little doubt but that many other fierce and formidable Dinosaurs were living at the same time and in the same region with Brontosaurus, whose remains are found in the Jurassic rocks of Colorado (Atlantosaurus beds). How this apparently helpless and awkward animal escaped in the struggle for existence it is not easy to conjecture; but since there is reason to believe it was more or less at home in the water, and could use its powerful tail in swimming, we may perhaps find a way out of the difficulty by supposing that, when alarmed by dangerous flesh-eating foes, it took to the water, and found discretion to be the better part of valour. Although apparently stupid, the Brontosaur probably possessed a good deal of cunning, and we can fancy it stretching its long neck above reeds, ferns, and cycads to get a view of the approaching enemy. The Sauropoda, or lizard-footed Dinosaurs, show in many ways a decided approach to a simple or generalised crocodile; so much so, that Professor Cope is inclined to include crocodiles and sauropodous Dinosaurs in the same order. Still, there are im- portant differences in other members of this sub-order. Unfor- tunately, our knowledge is at present rather limited, owing to the want of complete skeletons. Vertebra, limb-bones, skulls, and teeth have all been discovered through the zeal and energy of 70 EXTINCT MONSTERS. Professor Marsh and his comrades, in the far west of America, as well as by the researches of English geologists, assisted by the labours of many ardent collectors of fossils, in this country. Some of these may now be briefly considered. In Plate V. we have endeavoured to give some idea of a huge thigh-bone (femur) belonging to the truly gigantic Dinosaur called Atlantosaurus. It is six feet two inches long, and a cast of it may be seen in the fossil reptile gallery of the British Museum of Natural History (Wall-case No. 3). It should be mentioned, however, that the original specimen is partly restored, so that its exact length to an inch or so is not quite certain. In our illustra- tion it is shown to be a little taller, when placed upright, than a full-grown man. Professor Marsh, the fortunate discoverer of this wonderful bone, calculates that the Atlantosaurus must have attained a length of over eighty feet! and, assuming that it walked upon its hind feet, a height of thirty feet ! It doubtless fed upon the luxuriant foliage of the sub-tropical forests, portions of which are preserved with its remains. Besides this thigh-bone, Professor Marsh has procured specimens of vertebrze from the different parts of the vertebral column; but no skull or teeth. The vertebrze are hollowed out much in the same way as those of Brontosaurus. The fore limbs were large, as in the latter animal ; and the extremities of the limbs were provided with claws. Taking all present evidence, it appears that the Atlantosaurus bore a general resemblance to its smaller contemporary. We can therefore form a fairly good idea of its aspect and proportions. The same Jurassic strata from the Rocky Mountains’ have yielded remains of another big Dinosaur, belonging to the same family. This genus, which has been named the Apatosaurus, is represented by a nearly complete skeleton, in the Yale College Museum ; and is fortunately in an excellent state of preservation. Another species, of smaller size, though not so complete, adorns the same collection. This was about thirty feet long, and is known as Apatosaurus grandis. THIGH-BONE OF THE LARGEST OF THE DINOSAURS, ATLANTOSAURUS, From a cast in the Natural History Museum. Length 6 feet 2 inches. PLATE V. THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS. 71 Morosaurus, another important genus, is known from a large number of individuals discovered in the now famous Atlantosaurus beds of Colorado, including one nearly complete skeleton, The head of this creature was small; the neck elongated; and the vertebree of the neck are lightened by deep cavities in their centra, similar to those in birds of flight. The tail, also, was long. When alive, this Dinosaur was about forty feet in length. It probably walked on all fours; and in many other respects was very unlike _ atypical Dinosaur. The brain was small, and it must have been sluggish in all its movements. The nearly complete remains of Morosaurus grandis were found togéther in a very good state of preservation in Wyoming, and many of the bones lay just in their natural positions. Diplodocus, of which several incomplete specimens have been discovered, was intermediate in size between Atlantosaurus and Morosaurus, and may have reached when living, a length of forty or fifty feet. Its skull was of moderate size, with slender jaws. The teeth were weaker than those of any other known Dinosaur, and entirely confined to the front of the jaws. Professor Marsh concludes from the teeth that Diplodocus was herbivorous, feeding on succulent vegetation, and that it probably led an aquatic life. Fig. 11 shows its skull. The remains of this interesting Dinosaur (Brontosaurus), which in several ways differs from other members of the “ lizard-footed ” group, were found in Upper Jurassic beds, near Canon City, Colo- rado. Asecond smaller species was also discovered near Morriscn, Colorado. All the remains lay in the Atlantosaurus beds. These strata—the tomb in which Nature has buried up so many of her dragons of old time—can be traced for several hundred miles on _the flanks of the Rocky Mountains, and are always to be known by the bones they contain. They lie above the Triassic strata and just below the Sandstone of the Dakota group. Some have regarded them as of Cretaceous age; but, judging from their fossils, there can be but little doubt that they were deposited 4 yee EXTINCT MONSTERS. during the Jurassic period—probably in an old estuary. They consist of shale and sandstone. Besides the numerous Dinosaurs, Professor Marsh’s colleagues have found abundant remains of crocodiles, tortoises, and fishes, with one Pterodactyl, a flying reptile (see chap. viil.), and several small marsupials. The wonderful collection of American Jurassic Dinosaurs in the Museum of Yale College includes the remains of several hundred individuals, many of them in exceilent pre- I 2 Fic. 11.—Head of Diplodocus. I. Side view. 2. Front view. servation, and has afforded to Professor Marsh the material for his classification already alluded to. ENGLISH DINOSAURS OF THE LIZARD-FOOTED GROUP. Unfortunately, there are at present no complete skeletons known of English Dinosaurs related to the American forms above de- scribed. But, since the English fossils were first in evidence by many years, and Marsh’s discoveries have confirmed in a remark- able way conclusions drawn by Owen, Huxley, Hulke, and Seeley, and others from materials that were rather fragmentary, it may be worth while to give some account of these remains and the inter- pretations they have received. Dr. Buckland, in his Bridgewater Treatise, 1836, referred to THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS. 73 a limb-bone in the Oxford Museum, from the great Odlite formation 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 Report 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 crocodilean order. In time, a fine series of limb-bones and vertebree was added to the Oxford Museum by Professor Phillips (Dr. Buckland’s successor at Oxford), who pronounced them to be Dinosaurian. The name “Cetiosaurus”! (or Whale-lizard), originally given by Owen, was unfortunate, because there is really nothing whale-like about it, except a certain coarse texture of some of the bones. In 1848 Dr. Buckland announced the discovery of another limb-bone (a femur), which Owen referred to Cetiosaurus ; it was four feet three inches in length. Between 1868 and 1870, how- ever, a considerable portion of a skeleton was discovered in the same formation at Kirtlington Station, near Oxford. These remains were the subject of careful examination by Professors Owen and Phillips. The femur this time was five feet four inches long. Their studies threw much light on the nature and habits of Cetiosaurus. Although showing in many ways an approach to the crocodile type of reptile, yet it was perceived from the nature of the limbs that they were better fitted for walking on land than are those of a crocodile, with its sprawling limbs. Still, Professor Owen was careful to point out that the vertebre of its long tail indicate suitability as a powerful swimming organ, and concluded that the 1 Greek—Zetion, whale ; sauvros, lizard. "4 EXTINCT MONSTERS. creature was more aquatic than terrestrial in its habits. Plaster casts of the limb-bones may be seen at the British Museum of Natural History, side by side with the huge Atlantosaurus cast sent by Professor Marsh. The Kimmeridge clay of Weymouth has yielded a huge arm- bone (or humerus), nearly five feet long ; and from Wealden strata of Sussex and the Isle of Wight vertebree have been collected. Altogether we have remains of Cetiosaurus from at least half a dozen counties. Unfortunately, no specimen of a skull has yet been found, and only two or three small and incomplete teeth, which may possibly have belonged to some other animal. Pro- fessor Owen estimated the length of the trunk and tail of the creature to have been thirty-five or thirty-six feet; but in the absence of further evidence it was not possible to form any con- clusion as to its total length. It is evident that Cetiosaurus was closely allied to the American Brontosaurus (p. 69); and so these earlier English discoveries have gained much in interest from the light thrown upon them by Professor Marsh’s huge Saurian. Another English Saurian of this group was the Ornithopsis, from Wealden strata in the Isle of Wight, which has been the sub- ject of careful study by Mr. Hulke and Professor Seeley. Their conclusions, based on the examination of separate portions of the skeleton (such as vertebrae), have been singularly confirmed by the discovery of Brontosaurus. In Ornithopsis the vertebree of the neck and back, though of great size, were remarkably light, and yet of great strength. One of the vertebrze of the back had a body, or centrum, ten inches long. Hoplosaurus and Pelosaurus were evidently reptiles closely allied to the above types; but at present are so imperfectly known that we need not consider them here. CHAPTER {Vis DINOSAURS (continued). ‘Fossils have been eloquently and appropriately termed ‘ Medals of Creation.’” —Dr. MANTELL. WHEN any tribe of plants or animals becomes very flourishing, and spreads over the face of the earth, occupying regions far apart from one another, where the geographical and other con- ditions, such as climate, are unlike, its members will inevitably develop considerable differences among themselves. During the great Mesozoic period, Dinosaurs spread over a large part of the world ; they became very numerous and powerful. Just as the birds and beasts (quadrupeds) of to-day show an almost endless variety, according to the circumstances in which they are placed, so that great and powerful order of reptiles we are now considering ran riot, and gave rise to a variety of forms, or types. Those described in the last chapter were heavy, slow-moving Dinosaurs, of great proportions, and were all herbivorous creatures, apparently without weapons of offence or defence. The group Theropoda, or “‘ beast-footed” Dinosaurs, that partly form the subject of the present chapter, were all flesh-eating animals ; and, as we shall discover from their fossilised remains, were of less size, and led active lives. In fact, they acted in their day the part played by lions and tigers to-day. In the year 1824 that keen observer and original thinker, the Rev. Dr. Buckland, described to the Geological Society of London some remains of a very strange and formidable reptile found in 76 EXTINCT MONSTERS. the Limestone of Stonesfield, near Woodstock (about twelve miles from Oxford). This rock, known as “ Stonesfield slate” from its property of splitting up into thin layers, has long been celebrated for its fossil remains, and from it have also been obtained the bones of some early mammals. It is a member of the Lower Oolitic group. The portions of skeleton originally discovered consisted of part of a lower jaw, with teeth, a thigh bone (femur), a series of vertebree of the trunk, a fewribs, and some other fragments. The name Megalosaurus,! or “great lizard,” suggested itself both to Dr. Buckland and Baron Cuvier, because it was evident from the size of the bones that the creature must have been very big. It is true these bones were not found together in one spot; but Professor Owen came to the conclusion that they all belonged to the same species. No entire skeleton of the Megalosaur has ever been found, but there was enough material to enable Dr. Buckland, Professor Owen, and Professor Phillips to form a very fair idea of its general structure. It should be mentioned here that Dr. Mantell, the enthusiastic geologist to whose labours paleontologists are greatly indebted, had previously discovered similar teeth and bones in the Wealden strata of Tilgate Forest. Sherborne, in Dorset, is another locality which has yielded a fine specimen of parts of both jaws with teeth. A cast of this may be seen in the geological collection at South Kensington. It was found in the Inferior Oolite (Wall-case IV.); the- original specimen lies in the museum of Sherborne College. Remains of Megalosaurus have also been found at the following places : Lyme-Regis and Watchet (in the Lias); near Bridport (in Inferior Oolite) ; Enslow Bridge (upper part of the Great Oolite and Forest Marble Beds); Wey- mouth (in Oxford Clay); Cowley and Dry Sandford (in the Coral Rag); Malton in Yorkshire (in Coralline Oolite); also in Normandy. ‘They have also been found in Wealden strata. 1 Greek—megas, great ; sauros, lizard. DINOSAURS. 77 The portion of a lower jaw in the Oxford Museum is twelve inches long, with a row of nine teeth, or sockets for teeth. The structure of the teeth leaves no doubt as to the carnivorous habits of the creature. With a length of perhaps thirty feet, capable of free and rapid movement on land, with strong hind limbs, short head, with long pointed teeth, and formidable claws to its feet, the Megalosaur must have been without a rival among the car- nivorous reptiles on this side of the world. It probably walked for the most part on its hind legs, as depicted in our illustration, and Professors Huxley and Owen, on examining the bones in the Oxford Museum, were much impressed with the bird-like character of some parts of the skeleton, showing an approach to the ostrich type. The form of the teeth, as pointed out by Dr. Fic. 12.—Lower jaw-bone of Megalosaurus, with teeth. Buckland, exhibits a remarkable combination of contrivances. When young and first protruding above the gum, the apex of the tooth presented a double cutting edge of serrated enamel ; but as it advanced in growth its direction was turned backwards in the form of a pruning knife, and the enamelled sawing edge was con- tinued downwards to the base of. the inner and cutting side, but became thicker on the other side, obtaining additional strength when it was no longer needed as a cutting instrument (Fig. 12). The genus Megalosaurus—now rendered classic through the labours of Professors Buckland, Phillips, and Owen—may be regarded as the type of the carnivorous Dinosaurs ; and it affords an excellent and instructive instance of the gradual restoration of the skeleton of a new monster from more or less fragmentary remains. Certain very excusable errors were at first made in the 78 EXTINCT MONSTERS. restoration, but these have since been rectified by a comparison with the allied American forms, such as Allosaurus, of which nearly entire skeletons have of late been discovered in strata of Jurassic age—in fact, the same rock in Colorado as that in which the huge Atlantosaurus bones lay hid. ‘The accompanying woodcut (Fig. 3) shows how the skeleton has been restored in the light of these later discoveries of Professor Marsh. ‘The large bones of the limbs of these formidable flesh-eating monsters were hollow, and many of the vertebrz, as well as some of those of the feet, Fic, 13.—Skeleton of Megalosaurus, restored. (After Meyer.) contained cavities, or were otherwise lightened in order to give the creature a greater power of rapid movement. It is not very difficult to imagine a Megalosaur lying in wait for his prey (perhaps a slender, harmless little mammal of the ant- eater type) with his hind limbs bent under his body, so as to bring the heels to the ground, and then with one terrific bound from those long legs springing on to the prey, and holding the mammal tight in its clawed fore limbs, as a cat might hold a mouse. Then the sabre-like teeth would be brought into action by the powerful jaws, and soon the flesh and bones of the victim would be gone! (See Plate VI.) *yooy Sz noqe YIBue'T ‘IA FLV Ig ‘IGNVINOAY SAYNVSOTVDAW SYNVSONIA SNOYOAINUVO V DINOSAURS. 79 As we remarked before, the carnivorous Dinosaurs were the lions and tigers of the Mesozoic era, and, what with small mammals and numerous reptiles of those days, it would seem that they were not limited in their choice of diet. It is a question not yet decided whether Dinosaurs laid eggs as most modern reptiles do, or were viviparous like quadrupeds ; but Professor Marsh thinks there are reasons for the latter supposition. During the early part of the Mesozoic era, at the period known as the Triassic (New Red Sandstone), Dinosaurs flourished vigorously in America, developing a great variety of forms and sizes. Although but few of their bones have as yet been dis- covered in those rocks, they have left behind unmistakable evidence of their presence in the well-known footprints and other impressions upon the shores of the waters which they frequented.* The Triassic Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley has long been famous for its fossil footprints, especially the so-called “ bird- tracks,” which are generally supposed to have been made by birds, the tracks of which they certainly appear to resemble. But a careful investigation of nearly all the specimens yet dis- covered has convinced Professor Marsh that these fossil impres- sions were not made by birds (see Fig. 14). Most of the three- toed tracks, he thinks, were made by Dinosaurs, who usually walked upon their hind feet alone, and only occasionally put to the ground their small fore limbs. He has detected impressions of the latter in connection with nearly all the larger tracks of the hind limbs. These double impressions are just such as Dinosaurs would make ; and, since the only characteristic bones yet found in the same rocks belong to this order of reptiles, it is but fair to attribute all these footprints to Dinosaurs, even where no impres- sions of fore feet have been detected, uzt:l some evidence of birds is forthcoming. The size of some of these impressions, as 1 Since the above was written, Professor Marsh has described, in Zhe American Journal of Science for June, 1892, several more or less complete skeletons of Triassic Dinosaurs, lately found, and now in the Yale College Museum. This is an important discovery. 80 EXTINCT MONSTERS. well as the length of stride they indicate, is against the idea of their having been made by birds. Some of them, for instance, are twenty inches in length, and four or five feet apart! The foot of the African ostrich is but ten inches long, so we must fall back on ty 1 ig a ie ee y wo 10 | Et | . \P) a wid ; _ — Fic. 57.—Skeleton of Great Trish Deer, Cervus giganteus, from shell-marl beneath the peat, Ireland. Antlers over g feet across. weight of the skull and antlers together is 76 lbs., but those of _ another specimen belonging to the Royal Dublin Society weigh 87 lbs. This great extinct deer surpassed the largest Wapite (Cervus Canadensis) in size, and its antlers were very much larger, — = *J99} II Stopjue jo peoids { yaaz OF s19apJUY dy Jo WWIWINS ayy OF ISIE "“SONAOVOAW SNANAO ‘WAAA HSIN LVAND AHL “AXX FLVIG GREAT IRISH DEER—STELLERS SEA-COW. 243 wider, and heavier. In some cases the antlers have measured more than 11 ft. from tip to tip. The body of the animal, as well as its antlers, were larger and stronger than in any existing deer. The limbs are stouter, as might be expected from the great weight of the head and neck. Another and more striking feature is the great size of the vertebrz of the neck; this was necessary in order to form a column capable of supporting the head and its massive antlers. (See Plate XXV.) The first tolerably perfect skeleton was found in the Isle of Man, and presented by the Duke of Athol to the Edinburgh Museum. It was figured in Cuvier’s Ossemens Fossiles. Besides those already mentioned at South Kensington and Dublin, there is one in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge. It cannot be doubted that, like all existing deer, the animal shed its antlers periodically, and such shed antlers have been found. When it is recollected that all the osseous matter of which they are composed must have been drawn from the blood carried along certain arteries to the head, in the course of a few months, our wonder may well be excited at the vigorous circula- tion that took place in these parts. In the Red Deer the antlers, weighing about 24 lbs., are developed in the course of about ten weeks; but what is that | compared to the growth of over 80 lbs. weight in some three or four months ? It is a mistake to suppose that the remains discovered in Ireland were found in peat; they occur not in the peat, but in shell-marls and in clays under the peat. This is an important point. for if the remains were found in the peat, they would prove that the Great Deer survived into a later period; instead of being (as is believed from geological evidence) con- temporary with the Mammoth and Woolly Rhinoceros in this country, and then disappearing from view. As already stated, it existed on the Continent, and may there have been exter- minated by man. 244 EXTINCT MONSTERS. Mr. W. Williams, who has explored several peat-bogs in Ireland, marking the site of ancient lakes, and found many specimens in beds underlying the peat, has given much interest- ing information bearing upon the question of the period when the Great Deer inhabited Ireland, and the manner in which it was preserved in the lake-beds.1 He spent ten weeks in 1876-77, excavating deer remains in the bog of Ballybetagh, and subse- quently made similar excavations in the counties of Mayo, Limerick, and Meath. These peat-bogs occupy the basins of lakes, the deeper hollows of which have long since been silted up with marls, clays, and sands, and in this silt, or mud, the plants which produced the peat grew. In all the bogs examined he found a general resemblance in the order of succession of the beds, with only slight variations in the nature of the materials such as might be easily accounted for by differences in the surrounding rocks. In these deposits the geologist may read, as in a book, the successive changes in climate that have taken place since the time when the country was deeply covered with snow and ice during the Glacial period. He found at the bottom of the old Ballybetagh Lake, and resting on the true Boulder Clay (a product of the ice-sheet), a fine stiff clay which seems to have been brought in by the action of rain washing fine clay out of the Boulder Clay, that nearly covered the land, and depositing it in the lake. This action probably took place during a period of thaw, when the climate was damp, from the melting of so much ice, and the rainfall con- siderable. ‘Then the climate improved, the cold of the Glacial period passed away, and the climate became warm. During this phase the next stratum was formed, consisting chiefly of vege- table remains. ‘The summers must have been unusually warm, dry, and favourable to the growth of vegetation on the bed of the lake. About this time the Great Irish Deer appeared on the scene, for its remains were found resting on this layer, or stratum, 2 Geological Magazine, new series, vol. viii. (1881), p. 354+ GREAT IRISH DEER—STELLERS SEA-COW. 245 in a brownish clay. This deposit also was the product of a time when the climate was mild. It is a true lake-sediment, with seams of clay and fine sand, the latter having been brought down by heavy rainfall from the hills, just as at the present day. Now, we have to consider how these Great Deer got buried in this deposit. How did they get drowned? They may have gone into the lakes to escape from wolves, or possibly to escape from ancient Britons (but that is still doubtful). Perhaps they went into the water to wallow, as is usual with deer, or they may have ventured to swim the lakes (see p. 19). To enter the lake from a sandy shore would be easy enough, but, on reaching the other side, they might find a soft mud instead, into which their small feet would sink ; and the more they plunged and struggled, the worse became their plight, until at last, weary and exhausted, the heavy antlers pressed their heads down under the water, and they were drowned. It does not follow, according to this theory, that either the entire animal ought to be found, or even its legs, sticking in the clay. For a few days it might remain so, but the motion of the waters of the lake would sway the body to and fro, while the gases due to decomposition would render it buoyant, and perhaps raise it bodily off the bottom. Then it might float before the wind, its head hanging down, till it reached the lee-side of the lake. Then the antlers would get fastened in mud near the shore, thus mooring the body until at last so much of the flesh of the neck had decayed that the body got separated from it, leaving the head and antlers near the shore. Nearly a hundred heads had been found in this lake previous to Mr. Williams’s explorations, and yet scarcely six skeletons. At first it is somewhat puzzling to account for this scarcity of skeletons compared with heads; but very likely the bodies, minus their heads, were carried right out of the lake, down a river, and perhaps reached the sea or got stranded somewhere down the river in such a way that the bones were never covered up. But 246 EXTINCT MONSTERS. in the Limerick bogs heads and skeletons were often found together. In that district the lakes were probably shallow and with but a feeble current, and so the body never floated away. This explanation by Mr. Williams seems satisfactory. He reports that the female skulls were rarely met with. Either they were more timid in swimming lakes, or, having no antlers, they may have succeeded in getting out, or the care of their young ones may have kept them out of the lakes during the summer months. The clay in which the remains occur is suc- ceeded by another bed of pure clay, which wever yields any skulls or bones. This, Mr. Williams thinks, was deposited at a time when the climate was more or less severe, and the musk-ox, reindeer, and other arctic animals came down from more northern regions, even down to the south of France. He concludes that this period marks the extinction of the Great Deer in Ireland, whether rightly or wrongly it is hard to say. Many observers are inclined to think that it lived on to a later period. An interest- ing fact, having some bearing on the question, is this: that the bones in some cases even yet retain their marrow in the state of a fatty substance, which will burn with a clear lambent flame. Evidence such as this seems to point to a more recent date for its extinction. STELLER’S SEA-Cow.! The Sirenia of the present day form a remarkable group of aquatic herbivorous animals, really quite distinct from the Cetacea (whales and dolphins), although sometimes erroneously classed with them. In the former group are the Dugong and the Manatee. These creatures pass their whole life in the water, inhabiting the shallow bogs, estuaries, and lagoons, and large rivers, but never venturing far away from the shore. ‘They browse ' For fuller information, see the Gvological Magazine, decade iii. vol. il. p- 412. Paper by Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S. GREAT IRISH DEER—STELLER’S SEA-COW. 247 beneath the surface on aquatic plants, as the terrestrial herbivorous mammals feed upon the green pastures on land. Not a few of the tales of mermen and mermaids owe their origin to these creatures, as well as to seals, and even walruses. The Portuguese and Spaniards give the Manatee a name signifying **Woman-fish,” and the Dutch call the Dugong the “Little Bearded Man.” A very little imagination, and a memory only for the marvellous, doubtless sufficed to complete the meta- morphosis of the half-woman, or man, half-fish, into a siren, a mermaid, ora merman. Hence the general name Sirenia. The Manatee (J/anatus) inhabits the west coast and rivers of tropical Africa, and the east coast and rivers of tropical America, the West Indies, and Florida. The Dugong (Haticore) extends along the Red Sea coasts, the shores of India, and the adjacent islands, and goes as far as the northern and eastern coasts of Australia. The most remarkable Sirenian is the Rhytina gigas, or *