Water Reptiles of the Past and Present

by Samuel Wendell Williston

Fig. 51.—Restoration of Ichthyosaurus
with young, by Charles R. Knight.
(By permission of the
American Museum of Natural History.)

It must be recollected, in extenuation of so extraordinary a blunder on the part of so learned a man as was Scheuchzer, who, as a physician and professor, one would think ought to have been able to distinguish between vertebrae so different as are those of an ichthyosaur and a man, that, during all of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, the belief was prevalent that all fossils were the relics of animals and plants that had perished in the great biblical flood. The science of geology was yet in its infancy, and there was no known record, other than the biblical one, of any great inundation of the earth’s surface which might account for the remains of sea-animals in rocks remote from the seas. This belief, so long held by even the wisest and most learned of scholars, so long welcomed by the theologians as proof of the literal accuracy of the Bible, was one of which Scheuchzer was quite convinced. His Piscium Querulae was largely a fantastic discussion of the supposed great world-catastrophe, the Noachian Deluge, by which the fishes had been destroyed and long imprisoned in the rocks through no sin of their own.

It was the same author who, in a subsequent work, described and figured the fossil skeleton of a large salamander which he believed to be that of a child destroyed in the flood, and which he called “Homo diluvii testis.” In this specimen, which was discovered in the Tertiary rocks of Oeningen, and which is still preserved among the historically as well as scientifically famous fossils of the museum at Haarlem under the name Andrias Scheuchzeri, Scheuchzer thought that he detected, not only the skeleton of a child, but even its brain, liver, muscles, etc.! His engraving of this “Witness of the Flood,” the “sorrowful skeleton of an old sinner drowned in the Flood,” as also that of the ichthyosaur vertebrae of Altorf, were afterward printed in the famous “Copper Bible” as positive proof of the literal accuracy of the biblical record.

Earlier than the publication of these figures by Baier and Scheuchzer, at the very close of the seventeenth century, a Welsh naturalist by the name of Lluyd, in a large and beautifully illustrated work, figured—perhaps for the first time—remains of ichthyosaurs, which he believed to be those of fishes. But Lluyd accounted for these and all other fossil remains by a very different theory from that of Scheuchzer and the theologians—a theory which at one time had many adherents among scholars. He believed that the spawn of fishes or the eggs of other creatures had been carried up from the seas and lands in moist vapors into the clouds, whence they had descended in rain, penetrating the earth to give origin to the fossils; in other words, he believed that all fossils grew in the earth from germs of the living animals that inhabited the land and seas. Certainly the old philosophers were hard driven to make facts agree with theories!

Remains of ichthyosaurs, abundant as they were and are in many deposits in England and Germany, attracted very little attention from the naturalists of the eighteenth century after the time of Scheuchzer and Baier, and nothing more was written about them until 1814, when Sir Everard Home, an English comparative anatomist, in an extensive series of large and finely illustrated, though rather discursive, works, described and figured a number of good specimens. To the animal the remains of which he rather vaguely and imperfectly described, he gave in 1819 the name Proteosaurus, in the belief that it was allied to the living Proteus, a salamander.

In 1821 the curator of mineralogy of the British Museum—Koenig by name—after a more critical study of other remains, reached the conclusion that these animals were intermediate between the fishes and the reptiles, and gave to them the generic name Ichthyosaurus, meaning fish-reptile, a name by which the chief forms have ever since been known. Within the next few years many specimens of ichthyosaurs were carefully and fully described by Conybeare, Cuvier, Owen, and others of England, France, and Germany, making very clear all the more important details of their skeletal structure. Blaineville, in 1835, thought that the ichthyosaurs constituted a distinct class of vertebrates equivalent to all other reptiles, the birds, and the mammals, which he called Ichthyosauria, the first appearance in literature of the name by which the order is properly known. Five years later, however, the famous English anatomist and paleontologist, the late Sir Richard Owen, united the ichthyosaurs with the plesiosaurs as a single order of reptiles, to which he gave the name Enaliosauria, meaning sea-reptiles, a name which has long been current in textbooks and general works on natural history. Moreover, Owen rather arbitrarily changed Blaineville’s name Ichthyosauria to Ichthyopterygia, a name which is often, though incorrectly, used to designate this order of reptiles. These briefly given and perhaps dry details will make clear how necessary is that rule of priority upon which naturalists so often insist. When anyone may change the names of organisms at will there will be no stability and no uniformity, because there is no one to decide, and the prestige of a great name, like that of Owen, will carry authority till someone else with greater authority appears. Whether or not the name Proteosaurus, first given to any member of this order, should take precedence over the later Ichthyosaurus is still in doubt, since Home gave no specific name to his species, and the very particular purists of modern times have decided that a genus is not named unless the species is also! We moderns sometimes are inclined to impose very stringent conditions upon the older naturalists; let us hope that we shall be treated more leniently by the future naturalists!

It will lead us too far astray to follow in detail the history of the further discoveries of the ichthyosaurs during the early part of the nineteenth century. It may briefly be said, only, that no other group of extinct backboned animals excited more interest among scientific men. One incident will suffice. More than sixty years ago, an interesting deduction as to the living form of the ichthyosaurs was made by Sir Richard Owen. He observed that many of the known skeletons, as they were found in their rocky matrix, had a remarkable dislocation of the vertebrae at a certain place near the end of the tail, and, although such an appendage was quite unknown in other reptiles either living or extinct, concluded that the living animals had a terminal, horizontal, fleshy fin, very much like that of the whales and sirenians. Sure enough, discoveries made forty years later disclosed impressions in the rocks, not only of a large caudal fin, but also of a dorsal fin, as well as outlines of the flesh-covered paddles. The dislocation of the vertebrae at the place where the fleshy fin joined the more slender tail was due to the action of currents of water, or simple gravitation, upon a thin vertical fin and not, as Owen supposed, to the twisting of the terminal part as it fell to a horizontal position after partial decomposition of the soft parts.

About twenty-five years ago, Professor E. Fraas, the present director of the Stuttgart Museum, described and figured very fully, not only specimens showing impressions of the fins and paddles, but also others of well-preserved and very complete skeletons of different species of ichthyosaurs from the Jurassic deposits of Würtemberg, in which remains of these animals occur in great profusion. His researches, and those of several authors since then, supplementing and confirming or disproving those of the many observers made during the preceding seventy years, have finally determined almost perfectly the complete structure of the more typical ichthyosaurs, enabling us to infer not a little as to their habits and distribution in the old Jurassic oceans. Within the past few years the discoveries of Professor J. C. Merriam of California have likewise added greatly to our knowledge of the earlier ichthyosaurs. It may now truthfully be said that of no group of extinct reptiles do we have a more complete and satisfactory knowledge than of the ichthyosaurs.