2-979-649 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Fossil Plesiosaurus recently found at Street, near Glastonbury, 1857. 'The lias quarries of Street...in Somersetshire, are celebrated for their fossil revelations of a remote period of the earth's history. This locality appears to have been the resort of those strange monsters the Saurians, and was probably, at the distant epoch marked by this peculiar development of animal life, an immense lake or muddy lagoon - a supposition favoured by the size and position of the lias strata. The vertebrae [of the specimen] are quite perfect, but the ribs are slightly displaced, as are also the pectoral bones and those of the pelvis. The "paddles" appear to be turned under the body, so that their digits appear on the lower side. The animal seems to have turned back its singular pointed head in the agony of death; and the skeleton has preserved the last attitude of dissolution through the successive changing phases of the world's existence'. From "Illustrated London News", 1857.