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THE PLESIOSAURUS.

Those still more strange looking animals with very long necks, which are represented swimming in the water, have been named Plesiosauri, a word signifying, related to, or closely resembling, a lizard. There are some nearly perfect specimens in the British Museum, and this is a representation made up by taking the uninjured parts of several, so as to make up a perfect whole.

Taking it altogether, there is not one of the fossil animals so much unlike anything at present known to exist. Its usual length was from 9 to 15 feet, but it was at times very much larger.

The head was much shorter in proportion than that of the Icthyosaurus, being more like that of the guana, the lizard which people eat in the West Indies. The neck must have been longer than that of any living animal, not even excepting the swan; it contained thirty-three bones, or vertebræ, while the whole of the rest of the back-bone in the body and tail, contained only fifty-seven.

The faces of these vertebræ were nearly flat, and not hollow like those of the Icthyosaurus, which would better enable the animal to exist on land, and it appears to have moved about in the same manner as seals do. From some very ingenious observations on certain parts of its anatomy, (which if I were to endeavour to explain to you, you would not understand, unless you possessed a great deal of anatomical knowledge,) naturalists have supposed that it used to change the colour of its skin like the chameleon. Its paddles were almost exactly like those of the turtle, and its body was something of the same shape, but not quite so wide.