The World Before the Deluge

by Louis Figuier

1. Polypi; 2. Foraminifera; 3. Amorphozoa.

1. Cycollites elliptica; Thecosmilia rudis; Enallocœnia ramosa; Meandrina Pyrenaica; Synhelia Sharpeana. 2. Orbitoides media; Lituola nautiloidea; Flabellina rugosa. 3. Coscinopora cupuliformis; Camerospongia fungiformis.

Among the numerous beings which inhabited the Upper Cretaceous seas there is one which, by its organisation, its proportions, and the despotic empire which it would exercise in the bosom of the waters, is certainly most worthy of our attention. We speak of the Mosasaurus, which was long known as the great animal of Maestricht, because its remains were found near that city in the most modern of the Cretaceous deposits.

In 1780 a discovery was made in the quarries of Saint Peter’s Rocks, near Maestricht, of the head of a great Saurian, which may now be seen in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. This discovery baffled all the science of the naturalists, at a period when the knowledge of these ancient beings was still in its infancy. One saw in it the head of a Crocodile; another, that of a Whale; memoirs and monographs rained down, without throwing much light on the subject. It required all the efforts of Adrian Camper, joined to those of the immortal Cuvier, to assign its true zoological place to the Maestricht animal. The controversy over this fine fossil engaged the attention of the learned for the remainder of the last century and far into the present.

Maestricht is a city of the Netherlands, built on the banks of the Meuse. At the gates of this city, in the hills which skirt the left or western bank of the river, there rises a solid mass of cretaceous formation known as Saint Peter’s Rocks. In composition these beds correspond with the Meudon chalk beds, and they contain similar fossils. The quarries are about 100 feet deep, consisting in the upper part of twenty feet abounding in corals and Polyzoa, succeeded by fifty feet of soft yellowish limestone, furnishing a fine building stone, which has been quarried from time immemorial, and extends up to the environs of Liège; this is succeeded by a few inches of greenish soil with Encrinites, and then by a very white chalk with layers of flints. The quarry is filled with marine fossils, often of great size.

These fossil remains, naturally enough, attracted the attention of the curious, and led many to visit the quarries; but of all the discoveries which attracted attention the greatest interest attached to the gigantic animal under consideration. Among those interested by the discovery of these strange vestiges was an officer of the garrison of Maestricht, named Drouin. He purchased the bones of the workmen as the pick disengaged them from the rock, and concluded by forming a collection in Maestricht, which was spoken of with admiration. In 1766, the trustees of the British Museum, hearing of this curiosity, purchased it, and had it removed to London. Incited by the example of Drouin, Hoffmann, the surgeon of the garrison, set about forming a similar collection, and his collection soon exceeded that of Drouin’s Museum in riches. It was in 1780 that he purchased of the quarrymen the magnificent fossil head, exceeding six feet in length, which has since so exercised the sagacity of naturalists.

Hoffman did not long enjoy the fruits of his precious prize, however; the chapter of the church of Maestricht claimed, with more or less foundation, certain rights of property; and in spite of all protest, the head of the Crocodile of Maestricht, as it was already called, passed into the hands of the Dean of the Chapter, named Goddin, who enjoyed the possession of his antediluvian trophy until an unforeseen incident changed the aspect of things. This incident was nothing less than the bombardment and surrender of Maestricht to the Army of the North under Kleber, in 1794.

The Army of the North did not enter upon a campaign to obtain the crania of Crocodiles, but it had on its staff a savant who was devoted to such pacific conquests. Faujas de Saint-Fond, who was the predecessor of Cordier in the Zoological Chair of the Jardin des Plantes, was attached to the Army of the North as Scientific Commissioner; and it is suspected that, in soliciting this mission, our naturalist had in his eye the already famous head of the Crocodile of the Meuse. However that may be, Maestricht fell into the hands of the French, and Faujas eagerly claimed the famous fossil for the French nation, which was packed with the care due to a relic numbering so many thousands of ages, and dispatched to the Museum of Natural History in Paris. On its arrival, Faujas undertook a labour which, as he thought, was to cover him with glory. He commenced the publication of a work entitled “The Mountain of Saint Peter of Maestricht,” describing all the fossil objects found in the Dutch quarry there, especially the Great Animal of Maestricht. He endeavoured to prove that this animal was a Crocodile.

Unfortunately for the glory of Faujas, a Dutch savant had devoted himself to the same study. Adrian Camper was the son of a great anatomist of Leyden, Pierre Camper, who had purchased of the heirs of the surgeon Hoffman some parts of the skeleton of the animal found in the quarry of Saint Peter. He had even published in the Philosophical Transactions of London, as early as 1786, a memoir, in which the animal is classed as a Whale. At the death of his father, Adrian Camper re-examined the skeleton, and in a work which Cuvier quotes with admiration, he fixed the ideas which were until then floating about. He proved that the bones belonged neither to a Fish, nor a Whale, nor to a Crocodile, but rather to a particular genus of Saurian Reptiles, or marine lizards, closely resembling in many important structural characters, existing Monitors and Iguanas, and peculiar to rocks of the Cretaceous period, both in Europe and America. Long before Faujas had finished the publication of his work on La Montagne de Saint-Pierre that of Adrian Camper had appeared, and totally changed the ideas of the world on this subject. It did not, however, hinder Faujas from continuing to call his animal the Crocodile of Maestricht. He even announced, some time after, that Adrian Camper was also of his opinion. “Nevertheless,” says Cuvier, “it is as far from the Crocodile as it is from the Iguana; and these two animals differ as much from each other in their teeth, bones, and viscera, as the ape differs from the cat, or the elephant from the horse.”