Faujas-de-St.-Fond, Barthélemy (1741-1819).
Histoire naturelle de la Montagne de Saint-Pierre de Maestricht. Paris: Chez H.J. Jansen..., 1799.
In 1780, a large fossil skull was unearthed in a quarry in Maastricht in the Netherlands. The skull came into the hands of the French when Faujas-de-St.-Fond and French revolutionary forces marauded through Holland in 1794 and brought back all sorts of scientific booty, including this specimen. The giant four-foot-long jaw was the third of its kind to come to light and was quite the topic of conversation. One Dutch naturalist argued that it came from a toothed whale, but Faujas disagreed. In his beautiful book on the fossils from Maastricht, we can see a dramatic vignette on the title page that re-enacts the discovery of the specimen now in Paris (see the introduction to this section), a second and much larger engraving of the Paris specimen, and an illustration of what Faujas believed to be the Maastricht animal’s closest relative, the Nile crocodile.
It is noteworthy that Faujas rejected the possibility that the Maastricht animal was an extinct creature. Thirteen years later, Georges Cuvier would feel quite comfortable in suggesting that the Maastricht animal was an extinct marine reptile, forty feet long, which would later be called a mosasaur (see item 42).