Plesiosaurus.
The discovery of this genus forms one of the most important additions that geology has made to comparative anatomy. Baron Cuvier deemed “its structure to have been the most singular, and its characters the most monstrous, that had been yet discovered 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,” writes Dr. Buckland, “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.” (Op. cit., vol. v. p. 203).
The first remains of this animal were discovered in the lias of Lyme Regis, about the year 1823, and formed the subject of the paper by the Rev. Mr. Conybeare (now Dean of Llandaff), and Mr. (now Sir Henry) De la Beche, in which the genus was established and named Plesiosaurus (from the Greek words, plesios and sauros, signifying “near” or “allied to,” and “lizard”), because the authors saw that it was more nearly allied to the lizard than was the Ichthyosaurus from the same formation.
The entire and undisturbed skeletons of several individuals, of different species, have since been discovered, fully confirming the sagacious restorations by the original discoverers of the Plesiosaurus. Of these species three have been selected as the subjects of Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins’s reconstructions and representations of the living form of the strange reptiles.