Two centuries ago, naturalists began to realize that the enormous, fossilized bones they’d been finding all over the world belonged to extinct animals. A lot of extinct animals, who had once ruled the planet and were now mysteriously gone. Speculation about these creatures reached a fever pitch, resulting in drawings like these.
Reptiles restored, from the remains of which are to be found in a fossil state in Tilgate Forest, Sussex, a painting by George Scharf, after the research of Gideon Mantell
Mantell examined some fossil teeth in the 1820s belonged to a herbivorous reptile. After he saw teeth from an iguana, he wrongly surmised that the ancient reptile was simply a giant lizard. – according to Strange Science.
(via The University of Chicago Press Books)
A Cretaceous landscape with Gideon Mantell’s Iguanodons, by Josef Kuwasseg, 1851
(via Strange Science)
An Iguanodon and a Hyleosaurus, by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 1853
(via Copyright Expired)
Gigantic lizards and some Pterosauria, by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 1853
(via Copyright Expired)
Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus,on a watercolour painting by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 1853
(via Copyright Expired)
Illustrations from La Terre avant le déluge, by Louis Figuier, 1863
Megatherium
An Ichthyosaurus and a Plesiosaurus
A Hylaeosaurus and Teleosaurus
An Iguanodon and Megalosaurus fighting
(via Biblioteca de la Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias del Trabajo de la Universidad de Sevilla)
