It belonged to a young Iguanodon. This fortunate discovery was one of those Cuvier foresaw, and has served to verify his sagacious conjecture that some of the great bones collected by the doctor from the Wealden strata of Sussex belonged to the same animal, and to confirm other conclusions formed by the discoverer of the Iguanodon. Great was Dr. Mantell's delight on finding that every bone he had ascribed to Iguanodon solely from analogy was present in the Maidstone specimen. One of the chief advantages of this discovery was that it afforded demonstration of the characters of the vertebræ, which, as previously stated, are very important to the anatomist. Of these Professor Owen has given full descriptions, and has shown that they differ from those of any animal previously known, whether living or extinct.
It is very interesting, in the light of recent discoveries, to read the conclusions arrived at by Mantell and Owen, with regard to the organisation of this great Wealden reptile, and to see how, with the exception of certain details, they have been confirmed. Considering the imperfect nature of the materials at their command, it is wonderful that their forecasts should have turned out so successful. Thus Professor Owen predicted for the Iguanodon a total length of twenty-eight feet, and specimens discovered of late years show a length of twenty-four feet. In some, the thigh-bone exceeded a yard in length; this indicated an animal of great size, since in the largest crocodiles this bone is scarcely a foot long. Again, Dr. Mantell, from a study of the imperfect jaw-bones in his collection, concluded that the lower jaw was invested with a well-developed fleshy flexible lip, and that the mouth was provided with a tongue of great mobility and power. "There are strong reasons," he says, "for supposing that the lip was flexible, and, in conjunction with the long fleshy prehensile tongue, constituted the instrument for seizing and cropping the leaves and branches, which, from the construction of the molars, we may infer, constituted the chief food of the Iguanodon. The mechanism of the maxillary organs (jaws), as elucidated by recent discoveries, is thus in perfect harmony with the remarkable characters which rendered the first known teeth so enigmatical; and in the Wealden herbivorous reptile we have a solution of the problem, how the integrity of the type of organisation peculiar to the class of cold-blooded vertebrata was maintained, and yet adapted, by simple modifications, to fulfil the conditions required by the economy of a gigantic terrestrial reptile, destined to obtain support exclusively from vegetable substances; in like manner, as the extinct colossal herbivorous Edentata (sloths, see Chapter XII.), which flourished in South America ages after the country of the Iguanodon and its inhabitants had been swept away from the face of the earth."