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.

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Some Early Mammals and the Story of the Horse: Owen

The first additional evidence which Sir R. Owen obtained of the true nature of this ancient mammal was furnished by a fossil canine tooth brought up from a depth of a hundred and sixty feet out of the Plastic Clay during the operation of sinking a well in the neighbourhood of Camberwell, near London. This circumstance caused Sir R. Owen' to remind his readers of the old proverb, "Truth lies at the bottom of a well." It was nearly three inches long, and evidently belonged to a large hoofed mammal. With regard to the teeth, he remarked that their broad- Femib PLATE XL.

CORYPHODON. EOCENE PERIOD OF EUROPE AND AMERICA.

FIG. 92. Skeleton of Coryphodon hamatus. (Restored, after Marsh.) Length
FIG. 92. Skeleton of Coryphodon hamatus. (Restored, after Marsh.) Length
Some Early Mammals and the Story of the Horse: Owen — from Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days (1900)

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