ichthyosauria

Definitions

An order of gigantic extinct marine fish-like Reptilia, having somewhat the shape of a cetacean mammal, with an enormous head, no obvious neck, and a tapering body, with four paddle-like flippers, and probably a fin-like expansion of the caudal region.

noun plural (Paleon.) An extinct order of marine reptiles, including Ichthyosaurus and allied forms; -- called also Ichthyopterygia. They have not been found later than the Cretaceous period.

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About us swarmed the mighty denizens of the primeval deep -- plesiosauri and ichthyosauria with all their horrid, slimy cousins whose names were as the names of aunts and uncles to Perry, but which I have never been able to recall an hour after having heard them.

Pellucidar Edgar Rice Burroughs 1912
If I went below that, I should come upon the chalk, and there I should find something altogether different, the remains of ichthyosauria and pterodactyles, and ammonites, and so forth.

Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02 Thomas Henry Huxley 1860
I do not know what Mr. Godwin Austin would say comes next, but probably rocks containing more ammonites, and more ichthyosauria and plesiosauria, with a vast number of other things; and under that I should meet with yet older rocks containing numbers of strange shells and fishes; and in thus passing from the surface to the lowest depths of the earth's crust, the forms of animal life and vegetable life which I should meet with in the successive beds would, looking at them broadly, be the more different the further that I went down.

Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02 Thomas Henry Huxley 1860