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.
The remains of fish-lizards have attracted the attention of collectors and describers of fossils for nearly two centuries past. The vertebræ, or "cup-bones," as they are often called, of which the spinal column was composed, were figured by Scheüchzer, in an old work entitled _Querelæ Piscium_; and, at that time, they were supposed to be the vertebræ 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 König, 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, undermined 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. König, of the British Museum, to believe the animal to have been a saurian, or lizard; but the vertebræ, 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 _Ichthyosaurus_, or fish-lizard. Mr. Johnson, of Bristol, who had collected for many years in that 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.