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Updated: June 13, 2025
Then, by slow degrees, the mountains of Brazil, with their mines of glittering gems, appeared above the surface of the waters, amid which huge reptile-like whales, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs buffeted the billows, and vast saurians, lizards, and alligators, rivalling the elephant in bulk, and twice his length such as the megalosaurus, the iguanodon, and teleosaurus crawled along the slimy shores; while giant birds, with wide-spreading feet, stalked across the newly-formed plains, or flew shrieking, with wings of prodigious expanse skimming the glittering sea, the lords paramount of this lower world.
It was of enormous size and power, like an erect elephant, but its movements, in spite of its bulk, were exceedingly alert. For a moment, as I saw its shape, I hoped that it was an iguanodon, which I knew to be harmless, but, ignorant as I was, I soon saw that this was a very different creature.
In other words: it was probable that there should exist geological evidences of suffering and death: that the gigantic ichthyosaurus should be found fixed in rock with his cruel jaws closed upon his prey: that the fearful iguanodon should leave the tracks of having desolated a whole region of its reptile tribes: that volcanoes should have ravaged fair continents prolific of animal and vegetable life: that, in fine, though man's death came by man's sin, yet that death and sin were none of man's creating: he was only to draw down upon his head a prëexistent wo, an ante-toppling rock.
Now that the order of succession is precisely reversed, and that the age of the Iguanodon was long anterior to that of the Eocene Palaeophis and living boa, while the crocodile is in our own times the highest representative of its class, a retrograde movement in this important division of the vertebrata must be admitted.
The place was a small clearing in the center of a palm grove. In this was one of those boiling mud geysers which I have already described. Around its edge were scattered a number of leathern thongs cut from iguanodon hide, and a large collapsed membrane which proved to be the dried and scraped stomach of one of the great fish lizards from the lake.
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