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 Cañon City, Colorado. A second smaller species was also discovered near Morrison, 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 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. viii.]), 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 excellent preservation, and has afforded to Professor Marsh the material for his classification already alluded to.
Fig. 11.—Head of Diplodocus.
1. Side view. 2. Front view.
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 described. But, since the English fossils were first in evidence by many years, and Marsh’s discoveries have confirmed in a remarkable 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 interpretations they have received.
Dr. Buckland, in his Bridgewater Treatise, 1836, referred to a limb-bone in the Oxford Museum, from the great Oolite 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 vertebræ was added to the Oxford Museum by Professor Phillips (Dr. Buckland’s successor at Oxford), who pronounced them to be Dinosaurian. The name “Cetiosaurus”[11] (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.
[11] Greek—ketion, whale; sauros, lizard.
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, however, 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.