Thomas Henry Huxley

On Stagonolepis Robertsoni, and on the Evolution of the Crocodilia

Nearly seventeen years ago I had the honour of laying before the Geological Society* an account of such remains of a remarkable reptile (Stagonolepis Robertsoni) as, up to that time, had been found in the sandstones of the neighbourhood of Elgin, and the conclusion at which I had arrived, “that Stagonolepis is, in the main, a Crocodilian reptile.” These remains, however, like all the other fossils from the same district which have come under my notice, were not in a condition very favourable to their interpretation. With the exception of a few dermal scutes, I do not think that a single entire bone, or cast of a bone, has come into my hands; and the most instructive specimens have not been the bones themselves, the osseous matter being always soft, friable, and injured, but their casts in the sandstone. The evidence afforded by the remains of vertebræ and scutes was sufficiently decisive to warrant my conclusion as to the general nature of the animal; but, in respect of the other parts of the skeleton, the surmises which I made in 1858 needed confirmation, or the reverse, by the study of additional materials. Such materials have from time to time been obtained by the exertions of my friend the Rev. Dr. Gordon, of Birnie, near Elgin, who, aided by a grant from the Donation Fund of the Royal Society, has undertaken the exploration of the fossiliferous beds whenever the operations of the quarrymen laid them bare, and has from time to

Further Evidence of the Affinity between the Dinosaurian Reptiles and Birds

On my way to Birmingham, in October 1867, I chanced to meet with Prof. Phillips; and mentioning some palæontological inquiries, chiefly relating to the Ichthyosauria (with which I then happened to be occupied), he very kindly urged me, as I returned to London, to pay a visit to the collection under his charge in the University Museum at Oxford. I did so; but as we were traversing the museum towards the Ichthyosaurian cases, we stopped at that containing the Megalosaurian remains, and I may say with Francesca— It is indeed a wonderful collection, ample enough to occupy the working hours of many a day; and it was particularly attractive to me, as some difficulties in the organization of Megalosaurus and its allies had long perplexed me. As Prof. Phillips directed my attention to one after the other of the precious relics, my eye was suddenly caught by what I had never before seen, namely the complete pectoral arch of the great reptile, consisting of a scapula and a coracoid ankylosed together. Here was a tangle at once unravelled. The coracoid was totally different from the bone described by Cuvier, and by all subsequent anatomists, under that name. What then was the latter bone? Clearly, if it did not belong to the shoulder-girdle it must form a part of the pelvis; and, in the pelvis, the ilium at once suggested itself as the only possible homologue. Comparison with skeletons of reptiles and of birds, close at hand, showed it to be.

The Croonian Lecture: --On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull

The necessity of discussing so great a subject as the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull in the small space of time allotted by custom to a lecture, has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. As, on the present occasion, I shall suffer greatly from the disadvantages of the limitation, I will, with your permission, avail myself to the uttermost of its benefits. It will be necessary for me to assume much that I would rather demonstrate, to suppose known much that I would rather set forth and explain at length; but on the other hand, I may consider myself excused from entering largely either into the history of the subject, or into lengthy and controversial criticisms upon the views which are, or have been, held by others. The biological science of the last half-century is honourably distinguished from that of preceding epochs, by the constantly increasing prominence of the idea, that a community of plan is discernible amidst the manifold diversities of organic structure. That there is nothing really aberrant in nature; that the most widely different organisms are connected by a hidden bond; that an apparently new and isolated structure will prove, when its characters are thoroughly sifted, to be only a modification of something which existed before,—are propositions which are gradually assuming the position of articles of faith in the mind of the investigators of animated nature, and are directly, or by implication, admitted among the axioms of natural history.

On a Fossil Bird and a Fossil Cetacean from New Zealand

Some time ago, my friend Mr. Walter Mantell submitted to my examination two fossil bones from tertiary deposits at Kakaunui and Parimoa in New Zealand. Of these, the one is the right tarso-metatarsal bone of a Bird belonging to the Penguin family, the other the humerus of a Cetacean of small size. Fossil Bird.—The former bone (of which a front view is represented in fig. 1, and a back view in fig. 2) measures two inches and a half in extreme length, and rather more than an inch and a quarter across its proximal end. The precise width at the distal end cannot be given, as the innermot part of this extremity ofthe bone has been broken away; what remains measures inch. The proximal end of the bone presents two articular facets,—the one internal, an oval, shallow concavity, looking upwards and a little inwards, the other, external, quadrilateral, slightly convex from before backwards, slightly concave from side to side, and inclined more obliquely upwards and outwards. The two facets are separated by a stout median ridge, which rises into a conical tuberosity anteriorly, but dies away posteriorly into a shallow triangular pit. The posterior edges of both facets are rather more raised than the anterior ones; and marked transverse depressions separate both from the upper extremities of the four strong calcaneal ridges which project from the upper part of the posterior face of the bone (fig. 2). Of these, the innermost is the strongest and longest; and a deep groove divides it from the two middle ones,

On the Classification of the Dinosauria, with observations on the Dinosauria of the Trias

The recognition of what are now commonly termed the Dinosauria, as a peculiar group of the Reptilia, is due to that remarkable man whose recent death all who are interested in the progress of sound palæeontology must deplore–Hermann von Meyer. In his ‘Palælogiea,’ published so long ago as 1832 ∗, Von Meyer classifies fossil reptiles according to the nature of their locomotive organs; and his second division, defined as “ Saurians, with limbs like those of the heavy terrestrial Mammalia,” is established for Megalosaurus and Iguanodon. To this group Von Meyer subsequently applied the name of Pachypodes or Pachypoda. Nine years afterwards Professor Owen, in his “Report on British Fossil Reptilia,” conferred a new name upon the group, and attempted to give it a closer definition, in the following passages :– “ Dinosaurians.–This group, which includes at least three well established genera of Saurians, is characterized by a large sacrum composed of five ankylosed vertebræ of unusual construction, by the height and breadth and outward sculpturing of the neural arches of the dorsal vertebræ, by the twofold articulation of the ribs to the vertebræ, viz. at the anterior part of the spine by a head and tuberele, and along the rest of the trunk by a tuberele attached to the transverse process only; by broad and sometimes complicated coracoids and long and slender clavicles, whereby Croeodilian characters of the vertebral column are combined with a Lacertian type of the pectoral arch ; the dental organs also exhibit the same transitional

On some Amphibian and Reptilian Remains from South Africa and Australia

At the Evening Meeting of this Society held on the 17th of November 1858, a paper by Mr. Stow “On some Fossils from South Africa” was read. In the course of the discussion which followed, my opinion as to the nature of one of those fossils was asked. With so much reserve as was due to the cursory character of my examination of the remains, I expressed my conviction that the organism in question was the skull of a Labyrinthodont Amphibian, and briefly stated the grounds upon which I based that conclusion. The Chairman of the Meeting then called upon me to undertake a thorough investigation of the matter; and I now report the results of my inquiries in the first of the following papers, in which I have embodied, incidentally, the description of an allied Australian Amphibian. 1. On Micropholis Stowii and Bothriceps Australis. Micropholis Stowii—The skull in question is inch long, and has, when viewed from above, a parabolic outline (Pl. XXI. fig. 1), or it might be compared to the half of a long ellipse, half of the longer diameter of which is to its shorter diameter as 13 to 10. The bony plates which formed the roof of the skull (fig. 1) have entirely disappeared, as have those which constituted the greater part of its right lateral parietes; but on the left side (fig. 2), the lateral walls are in a tolerably good state of preservation. The matrix has split in such a manner that that portion of it which is bounded by the contour of the skull

On the Stagonolepis Robertsoni (Agassiz) of the Elgin Sandstones; and on the recently discovered Footmarks in the Sandstones of Cummingstone

Introduction In establishing the genus Stagonolepis Prof. Agassiz remarks*—“I have founded this genus upon a slab on which the impression of many series of great rhomboidal scales, arranged in the same way as those of the Lepidosteidæ, is observable. The angular form of these impressions allows of no doubt that the fish whence they proceeded was a great ganoid similar to Megalichthys. The absence of the fins, of the head, and of the teeth, however, renders the exact determination of the family to which the fossil belongs impossible. I arrange it provisionally in the neighbourhood of the genus Glyptopomus to which it presents some analogy in the ornamentation of its scales.” Prof. Agassiz goes on to say, in a subsequent paragraph, that the fossil came from the Upper Old Red at Lossiemouth; that he had not himself seen the original, and that he was acquainted with it only through Mr. Robertson’s drawings. Stagonolepis has remained ranged among the fishes in all the works on Geology and Palæontology which have been published Since the appearance of the ‘Mononographie.’ Sir C. Lyell, however, informs me that some years ago, after perusing the memoir on Mystriosaurus by Dr. A. Wagner, to which I shall have occasion to refer by and by, his suspicions were roused as to the real affinities of this so-called fish ; and he even communicated to the late Mr. Hugh Miller his doubts (based on the strong resemblance which he perceived between the sculpture of the dermal plates of Stagonolepis

On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of the Medusae

1. Perhaps no class of animals has been so much investigated with so little satisfactory and comprehensive result as the family of the Meduœ, under which name I include here the Medusœ, Monostomatœ and Rhizostomidœ; and this, not for the want of patience or ability on the part of the observers (the names of Ehrenberg, Milne-Edwards, and De Blainville, are sufficient guarantees for the excellence of their observations), but rather because they have contented themselves with stating matters of detail concerning particular genera and species, instead of giving broad and general views of the whole class, considered as organized upon a given type, and inquiring into its relations with other families. 2. It is my intention to endeavour to supply this want in the present paper—with what success the reader must judge. I am fully aware of the difficulty of the task, and of my own incompetency to treat it as might be wished; but, on the other hand, I may perhaps plead that in the course of a cruise of some months along the east coast of Australia and in Bass’s Strait I have enjoyed peculiar opportunities for investigations of this kind, and that the study of other families hitherto but imperfectly known, has done much towards suggesting a clue in unravelling many complexities, at first sight not very intelligible.

IV.—On Acanthopholis Horridus, a New Reptile from the Chalk-marl

Some time since, my colleague, Dr. Percy, purchased from Mr. Griffiths, Some of Folkestone, and sent to me, certain fossils from the Chalk-marl near that town, which appeared to possess unusnal characters. On examining them I found that they were large scutes and spines entering into the dermal armour of what, I did not doubt, was a large reptile allied to Soelidosaurus, Hylœosaurus , and Polacanthus . I therefore requested Mr. Griffiths to procure for me every fragment of the skeleton which he could procure from the somewhat inconvenient locality (between tide-marks) in which the remains had been found, and I eventually succeeded in obtaining three teeth, with a number of fragments of the vertabrae, part of the skull and limb-bones, besides a large additional quantity of scutes. I am still not without hope of recovering other parts of the skeleton; but as the remains in my hands are sufficient to enable me to form a tolerably clear notion of the animals structure, a brief notice of its main features will probably interest the readers of the Geological Magazine.

Observations upon the Anatomy and Physiology of Salpa and Pyrosoma

1. The Salpæ, those strange gelatinous animals, through masses of which the voyager in the great ocean sometimes sails day after day, have been the subject of great controversy since the time of the publication of the celebrated work of Chamisso, ‘De Animalibus quibusdam è classe Vermium Linnæana.’ In this work were set forth, for the first time, the singular phenomena presented by the reproductive processes of these animals,—phenomena so strange, and so utterly unlike anything then known to occur in the whole province of zoology, that Chamisso’s admirably clear and truthful account was received with almost as much distrust as if he had announced the existence of a veritable Peter Schlemihl.