Читать книгу Peter Parley's Wonders of the Earth, Sea, and Sky онлайн

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There were also living at the same time with these creatures, several kinds of tortoises, and fish in immense varieties. The whole district where the south coast of England now is, seems to have then been a marsh with no vegetation but sea-weeds, reeds, and the like; and its only inhabitants were, fish, reptiles, and insects.

After the races of animals which we have mentioned, became extinct, a period followed in which they were succeeded by some monstrous creatures, like lizards in all respects, except that they were fitted to live in the water by the construction of their back-bone, their having lungs of the same kind as those of fishes, and the possession of fins. One of these, called the Iguanodon, was sometimes seventy feet long. It had a little horn near the end of its snout, placed something like the horn of a rhinoceros, and must have borne considerable resemblance in its general form to the guana, which I mentioned before. Their bones and teeth, are found at Lewes, in Sussex, and in the Isle of Wight, where you may pick them up on the shore, as you can the bones of Icthyosauri and Plesiosauri, at Lyme Regis, though not in such great numbers.