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The footsteps of the cheirotherium have been found also in the Stourton quarries above mentioned. Professor Owen, who stands at the head of comparative anatomy in the present day, has expressed his belief that this last animal was the same batrachian of which he has found fragments in the new red sandstone of Warwickshire.
It resembled the impression that would be made by the palm and extended fingers and thumb of the human hand, but a hand much thicker and flabbier than is commonly seen. The appropriate name of Cheirotherium was proposed for the unknown extinct animal which had produced these marks.
In the coal-field of Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, there were discovered in 1844, slabs marked with footprints bearing a considerable resemblance to those of the Cheirotherium, and believed to have been impressed by an animal of the same family, though with some important points of distinction.
Single footstep of Cheirotherium. Line of footsteps on slab of sandstone. The lower division or English representative of the "Bunter" attains a thickness of 1500 feet in the counties last mentioned, according to Professor Ramsay.
But M. Link conceived that some of the four species of animals of which the tracks had been found in Saxony might have been gigantic Batrachians, and when it was afterwards inferred that the Labyrinthodon was an air-breathing reptile, it was conjectured by Professor Owen that it might be one and the same as the Cheirotherium. Tooth of Thecodontosaurus; three times magnified. Riley and Stutchbury.
The hind-feet are not so much larger than the fore; and the two on each side, instead of coming nearly into one row, as in the European Cheirotherium, stand widely apart.
It has the head of a lizard, the snout of a dolphin, the teeth of an alligator, enormous eyes, whose membrane is strengthened by a bony frame, the vertebrae of fishes, sternum and shoulder-bones like those of the lizard, and the fins of a whale. Bayle calls it the whale of the saurians. Another may have been the Cheirotherium.
At Hessberg, in Saxony, the vestiges of four distinct animals have been traced, one of them a web-footed animal of small size, considered as a congener of the crocodile; another, whose footsteps having a resemblance to an impression of a swelled human hand, has caused it to be named the cheirotherium.
For many years these footprints have been referred to a large unknown quadruped, provisionally named Cheirotherium by Professor Kaup, because the marks both of the fore and hind feet resembled impressions made by a human hand. The larger impressions, which seem to be those of the hind foot, are generally eight inches in length, and five in width, and one was twelve inches long.
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