On the osteology of the genus Glyptodon / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
[1865]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the osteology of the genus Glyptodon / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    1/52
    iZ-'fri. c n\ '■! / II. On the Osteology of the genus Glyptodon. By Thomas H. Huxley, F.R.S. Received December 30, 1863,—Read January 28, 1864. Part I.—The history of the discovery and determination of the remains of the Hoplophoridce. Part II.—A description of the skeleton of Glyptodon clavipes, Owen (Hoplophorus Selloi, Lund?), § 1. Description of the Skull. § 2. Description of the Vertebral Column. Part I.—The history of the discovery and determination of the remains of the Hoplo- phoridse, or animals allied to, or identical with, Glyptodon clavipes. The earliest notice of the discovery of the remains of Glyptodon-Yike animals is con- tained in the following extract from a letter, addressed to M. Auguste St. Hilaire by Don Damasio Laranaga, Cure of Monte Video, which appears in a note at p. 191 of the fifth volume of the first edition of Cuvier’s ‘ Ossemens Fossiles,’ published in 1823:— “ I do not write to you about my Basypus (Megatherium, Cuv.), because I propose to make it the subject of a memoir which, I trust, may not be unworthy of the atten- tion of those European savants who take an interest in fossils. I will merely say that I have obtained a femur, which was found in the Eio del Sauce, a branch of the Saulis Grande. It weighs about seven pounds, and may be six or eight inches wide. In all points it resembles the femur of an Armadillo. I will send you one of its scales. The tail, as you have seen, is very short and very large; it also possesses scutes, but they are not arranged in rings, or in whorls. These fossils are met with, almost at the sur- face, in alluvial, or diluvial, formations of a very recent date. It would seem that similar remains exist in analogous strata near Lake Merrim, on the frontier of the Portuguese colonies.” Cuvier expresses no opinion as to the accuracy, or otherwise, of Don Damasio Laranaga’s identification of his Basypus with the Megatherium, an identification which, it will be seen, was erroneous. The volume of the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin for the year 1827 contains a memoir by Professor Weiss* upon the collections of fossils and minerals gathered in South America by Sellow, accompanied by five plates, four of which display excellent representations of various portions of the dorsal and caudal dermal armour, and of part of a femur, of one or more species of Glyptodon. Some of these fossils (the fragments of the dorsal dermal armour) were obtained at three feet from the surface, in the marly clay of which the banks of the Arapey Chico (a branch * Ueber das siidliche Ende dcs Gebirgzuges von Brasilien in der Provinz San Pedro do Sul und der Banda Oriental oder dem Staate von Monte Video: nacb den Sammlungen des Herrn Ea. Sellow, von Herrn Weiss (Gelesen in der Akademic der Wissenschaften am 9. August 1827, und 5. Juni 1828). MDCCCLXV. G