Michael Alan Taylor

Book

Ancient Marine Reptiles

Academic Press

Jack M. Callaway and Elizabeth L. Nicholls

xix-xlvi

This first-ever modern volume on fossil marine reptiles is a key event marking today's revival---indeed, a new Golden Age---of research on these extraordinary animals. Now is a good time to reassess their importance in the history of our science. Marine reptiles have long suffered, in popular and specialist accounts, by being overshadowed by the dinosaurs. This seems unfair. In the first Golden Age of their discovery, during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the marine reptiles made a major contribution to the development of vertebrate paleontology. This science barely existed when fossil crocodiles were discovered in the upper Lias of Yorkshire in 1758 (Benton and Taylor, 1984)' and when the famous skull of Mosasmirus was discovered at Maastricht, now in the Netherlands, in 1780 (Lingham-Soliar, 1995; Buffetaut, 1987). Yet, a few decades later, after the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur had been described, it was already a mature and productive science when Richard Owen finally described the order Dinosauria in 1842 (Torrens, 1992).

English