Note 5 — Chapter III · SUB-KINGDOM IX.—VERTEBRATA.

“Megˌa-lo-sauˈrus.” The word comes from the Greek, as do nearly all the words in this list, and means great lizard. The bones found in the rocks of the Oolite formation, the one next below the Wealden, show the animal to have been terrestrial and carnivorous. It fed upon smaller reptiles and the young of the larger orders. Its huge body was supported on four large, strong legs, the hind ones being estimated to have had a length of nearly six feet. The length of the animal must have been thirty or forty feet. In the first estimates made of all these saurians, their size was overestimated, the body of the iguanodon having been given as seventy feet in length, and the megalosaurus as sixty or seventy feet.