Some account of the fossil remains of an animal more nearly allied to fishes than any of the other classes of animals

Abstract

The bones here spoken of, are from the cliff between Lyme and Charmouth in Dorsetshire. The cliff, says the author, is composed of limestone, upon which is a stratum of blue clay two or three feet thick, in which these bones were deposited. A drawing has been made of these bones to accompany the paper, which supersedes the necessity of a very particular description. Their magnitude is such, that the head alone measures four feet. The upper and under jaw are very distinct, set with small conical teeth, as in the crocodile; but the lower jaw is not articulated as in that animal, but connected by an intermediate flat bone, as in fishes. The sclerotic coat of the eye is also, as in fish, bony, but is subdivided, as in the eyes of many birds, into a number of separate plates. The inter-vertebral cavities of the spine likewise prove, that this skeleton is that of a swimming animal; since the form of each cavity is that of an oblate oval, much wider in its transverse diameter than in the direction of the spine. The mode of articulation of the lower jaw, which admits of its being opened to a great extent, seems to show the animal to have been voracious, as would appear also from the structure of the teeth; but the points in which it differs from any one animal, and resembles others belonging to classes extremely remote, occasion the author to view it, with the singular productions of New South Wales, as one of the connecting links in the creation, formed for the purpose of preventing any void in the chain of imperceptible gradations, from one extreme of animated beings to the other.