Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days

The book that introduced the public to dinosaurs: sea-lizards, flying dragons, mammoths and the first horse, drawn from life by J. Smit and told by a clergyman-geologist who thought the museum's 'relics of a former world' deserved a storyteller.

The Great Fish-Lizards

5 pages in this part of Extinct Monsters.

The Great Fish-Lizards

"Berossus, the Chaldæan saith: A time was when the universe was darkness and water, wherein certain animals of frightful and compound forms…

The Great Fish-Lizards: Ichthyosauri

Probably our readers are already more or less familiar with the drawings of the fossilised remains of Ichthyosauri to be seen in almost…

The Great Fish-Lizards: Lias

Mr. Hawkins tells us that his youthful attention was directed to the Lias quarries, near Edgarly, in Somersetshire, in consequence of some…

The Great Fish-Lizards: Ichthyosaurus

It was in the period of the Lias that fish-lizards attained to their greatest development, both in numbers and variety; and the strata of…

The Great Fish-Lizards: Europe

They had a wide geographical range; for their remains have been discovered in Arctic regions, in Europe, India, Ceram, North America, the…

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days (1900) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored plates, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.