Pleasant Ways in ScienceProctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
Pleasant Ways in Science
Proctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
In the first place, Professor Owen pointed out that the sea-saurians
of the secondary period have been replaced in the tertiary and present
seas by the whales and allied races. No whales are found in the
secondary strata, no saurians in the tertiary. “It seems to me less
probable,” he says, “that no part of the carcase of such reptiles
should have ever been discovered in a recent unfossilized state, than
that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly
submerged and rapidly moving animal which might only be strange to
themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence from the
utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea-serpents,
krakens, or enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence,
than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the
public mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evidence
from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the
sea-serpent.”
To this it has been replied that genera are now known to exist, as the
_Chimæra_, the long-necked river tortoise, and the iguana, which are
closely related to forms which existed in the secondary era, while no
traces have been found of them in any of the intermediate or tertiary
strata. The chimæra is a case precisely analogous to the supposed case
of the enaliosaurus, for the chimæra is but rarely seen, like the
supposed enaliosaurus, is found in the same and absent from the same
fossiliferous strata. Agassiz is quoted in the _Zoologist_, page 2395,
as saying that it would be in precise conformity with analogy that such
an animal as the enaliosaurus should exist in the American seas, as
he had found numerous instances in which the fossil forms of the Old
World were represented by living types in the New. In close conformity
with this opinion is a statement made by Captain the Hon. George Hope,
that when in the British ship _Fly_, in the Gulf of California, the
sea being perfectly calm and transparent, he saw at the bottom a large
marine animal, with the head and general figure of an alligator, but
the neck much longer, and with four large paddles instead of legs.
Here, then, unless this officer was altogether deceived, which seems
quite unlikely under the circumstances, was a veritable enaliosaurus,
though of a far smaller species, probably, than the creature mistaken
for a sea-serpent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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