Water Reptiles of the Past and Present

by Samuel Wendell Williston

Fig. 68.—Clidastes, an American mosasaur.
Life restoration.

We have then in the aigialosaurs nearly every known intermediate character that we could wish for in a connecting link between the mosasaurs and the monitors, lizards that were equally at home on land or in the water, and there can be scarcely a doubt that they were either the direct ancestors or closely akin to the direct ancestors of the strictly marine mosasaurs; and scarcely a doubt that they were the descendants of the actual forbears of the modern monitors, which, as we have seen, have acquired partial aquatic habits in escaping from their enemies. The dolichosaurs we can now understand were a side branch from these semiaquatic aigialosaurs which, specializing in another direction, quickly came to grief, perhaps in competition with their more agile and skilful short-necked kin.

Taking all these facts into consideration it seems best to unite the monitors, dolichosaurs, and aigialosaurs into one group of the Lacertilia, the Platynota, intermediate in place between the true land lizards and the truly aquatic mosasaurs.

MOSASAURS

At St. Pietersberg, a small mountain in the vicinity of Maestricht, Holland, there are immense subterranean stone quarries, which have been worked for more than a thousand years. The stone quarried from them is a sandy limestone of Upper Cretaceous age containing many well-preserved remains of extinct animals that have long been sought by collectors of fossils. In 1776 Major Drouin—an officer of a near-by garrison, one of much military importance in those days—secured from one of these quarries some bones of an extinct reptile, which, though of interest, afforded but little information concerning the structure and affinities of the animal to which they had once belonged. In 1780 a very perfect skull, in excellent preservation, of the same kind of an animal was obtained from the same quarry by Dr. Hofmann, an army surgeon of the same garrison, whose interest in such things had been incited by Major Drouin’s collections. This specimen, so renowned in science, has had a remarkable and eventful human history, in part related by St. Faujas de Fond, a French commissary of the “Army of the North,” and one of the participants:

In one of the great galleries or subterranean quarries in which the Cretaceous stone of St. Pieter’s Mount is worked, about five hundred paces from the entrance, and ninety feet below the surface, the quarrymen exposed part of the skull of a large animal in a block of stone which they were engaged in quarrying. On discovering it they suspended their work and went to inform Dr. Hofmann, surgeon to the forces at Maestricht, who for some years had been collecting the fossils from the quarry, remunerating the workmen liberally for the discovery and preservation of them. Dr. Hofmann, arriving at the spot, saw with extreme pleasure the indication of a magnificent specimen; he directed the operations of the men, so that they worked out the block without injury to the fossil, and he then, by degrees, cleared away the yielding matrix and exposed the extraordinary jaws and teeth, which have since been the subject of so many drawings, descriptions, and discussions. This fine specimen which Dr. Hofmann had transported with so much satisfaction to his collection, soon became, however, a source of much chagrin to him. Dr. Goddin, one of the canons of Maestricht, who owned the surface of the soil beneath which was the quarry whence the fossil was obtained, when the fame of the fossil reached his ears, pleaded certain feudal rights in support of his claim to it. Hofmann resisted and the canon went to law. The whole chapter supported their reverend brother, and the decree ultimately went against the poor surgeon, who lost both the specimen and his money, for he was made to pay the costs of the action. The canon, leaving all remorse to the judges who pronounced the iniquitous sentence, became the happy and contented possessor of this unique example of its kind.

[Translation by Leidy.]

But the canon was ultimately despoiled of his ill-gotten treasure. At the siege of Maestricht in 1795, the famous skull to which Hofmann had devoted so much anxious thought and labor, fell into the hands of the French and was carried off as one of the spoils of war. So widely celebrated had the specimen become during the fifteen years which had elapsed since its discovery, through the writings of several noted scientific men, that the French general commanded his artillerists to spare the house in which it was known to be. The canon, however, shrewdly suspecting that such an unexpected and extraordinary mark of favor was not for his own sake but rather for the sake of the famous fossil, had it removed and carefully hidden in a house in the city. After the capitulation of Maestricht the eagerly sought-for fossil was not to be found, and the offer of a reward of six hundred bottles of wine, so the story goes, was made for its recovery. So tempting was the offer that, ere long, it was brought in triumph to the house of St. Faujas de Fond, by a half-dozen grenadiers, whence it was later transferred to Paris, where it now is.

We may well sympathize with Dr. Hofmann in the loss of his cherished specimen, since, had it not been for his zeal, money, and labor, it would never have escaped the usual fate of such things—complete destruction. But we must remember that St. Faujas de Fond, the recorder of this history, was a Frenchman, and somewhat interested in robbing the reverend canon of it; possibly there is another side of the story which has never been told.