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 Sea-Lizards

4 pages in this part of Extinct Monsters.

The Great Sea-Lizards

1821. In a later paper (1824) he gave a restoration of the entire skeleton of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus; and the accuracy of that…

The Great Sea-Lizards: History

The Great Sea-Lizards: Plesiosaurus

Plate V. is from a photograph of a Plesiosaurus skeleton set up as if it were that of a living animal in the Natural History Museum, in…

The Great Sea-Lizards: Ichthyosaurus

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.