Mr. Pterodactyl means "finger toe." What is our little finger was the longest of his five digits. It helped support and operate that big bat-like wing extending from his arms to his toes.] THE EARLIEST RULERS OF THE SEA The first monsters, like the first of almost everything else, including the land itself, were in the sea.[5] For a time giant fish, armor-plated like a man-of-war, and with awful appetites, just about ran everything. Then came the reign of the sharks. Some of them had jaws that opened to the height of a door--six feet or over. Next in succession, as rulers of the sea, were the fish-lizards, of whom that hinge-jawed Mesosaur was one. Of another of these fish-lizards a famous teacher of Edinburgh University, Professor Blackie, wrote that funny verse at the head of this chapter. The bones of this particular specimen were found sticking out of a cliff at Lyme-Regis, a popular watering-place in the English Channel, by a pretty English girl who was strolling along the beach. [5] "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble." [Illustration: A FAMILY PARTY The imagination of the artist enables us to picture this family party--Mrs. Ichthyosaurus and her children out for a stroll in prehistoric waters.] The Ichthyosaurus, as Professor Blackie says in his verse, was some thirty feet long, with a comparatively large head--like an alligator's--set close to his body. Another fish-lizard, well and unfavorably known by his neighbors of the sea, was the Plesiosaurus. Instead of fins he had big paddles resembling those of the seal. He was a kind of side-wheeler, like the Mississippi River steamboats, and he could go like everything! His neck was long and he darted after the smaller creatures he lived on. REIGN OF THE LIZARD FAMILY But these queer fish seem to have just been getting ready to land; for, by being lizards, they after a while managed it. A lizard, you know, belongs to the reptile family, and out of these sea reptiles there grew, in course of time, reptiles which lived, not in the sea but in the swamps along the sea. These reptiles were the Dinosaurs, and they are related to the Minosaurs and the Ichthyosaurus, and the rest of the Saurs, as you can see by the family name; for "saur" means lizard. Dinosaur means "terrible lizard." Don't you think he looks it?