Comment by ogogmad
9 months ago
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the Triceratops wouldn't be appropriate here. The point here is that the Megalosaurus was a real-life sea monster. The metaphor in the text is that it would appear that a flood had come and gone - which in prehistoric times, might have deposited a sea monster. No flood actually happened though.
EDIT: Damn, I'm mistaken. Before anyone points it out, the Megalosaurus was a land animal. It was a dinosaur whose bones were first discovered in the 1820s. I got it confused with a Megalodon or Mosasaurus.
I replaced it with a better-known dinosaur because Megalosaurus is not widely known today. I had to do a quick check to verify it actually is a dinosaur.
Looking a bit more, it seems that in 1800s there was the (mistaken) belief that Megalosaurus was amphibian. I thought it was a bit odd to reference a dinosaur there, but it makes more sense now. So to properly understand that reference you need to know about the state of dinosaur knowledge in the 1840s.