Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/226

224 blunt-nosed sturgeon of to-day, although the branches of the lower jaw were correspondingly massive. With such ramlike jaws the mosasaur possessed terrible powers of collision. They were scaled animals, and fragments of their hide and scales have been found in good condition of preservation.

The first mosasaur discovered was found by Major Drouin in 1776, on the banks of the river Meuse, near Maestricht, Germany, On this specimen was founded the genus Mosasaurus, given it by Conybeare in 1822, although the skeleton was previously described



by Cuvier in 1808. The interesting history of the specimen, which created a profound sensation in the world of learning and became mixed up in the history of nations, is herewith reduced from Owen. The skull was found in the quarries of St. Peter's Mount by M. Faujas Saint-Fond, Commissary for Sciences of the French Army of the North. In one of the galleries or subterraneous quarries in which the cretaceous stone of St. Peter's Mount was worked, about five hundred paces from the entrance and ninety feet below the surface, the quarrymen exposed part of the skull in a block of the stone which they were engaged in detaching. On this discovery they suspended work and went to inform Dr. Hofmann, surgeon of the forces of