"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."--Hugh 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 contemporary 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 Plesiosaurs.
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.[9] Conybeare, 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 _Transactions_ of that Society in the year 1821. In a later paper (1824) he gave a restoration 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.
[9] The name is derived from two Greek words--_plesios_, near, or allied to, and _sauros_, a lizard.
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."