REPORT ON THE SEALS. 



41 



Skeleton. — The four skeletons consisted of one female and three males. The female 

 (No. 2) skeleton was fully ossified. One male (No. 3) was fully ossified ; a second 

 (No. 1) had the epiphyses completely fused with the shafts of the long bones only at one 

 extremity, at the opposite a groove of demarcation was still visible ; the third (No. 4) 

 again was a much younger animal, and the epiphyses at both ends of the long bones were 

 separable from the shafts. 



Skull. — Along with the specimens of Arctocephalus australis from the Messier 

 Channel I have examined two skulls from Tuesday Bay, Desolation Island, Strait of 

 Magellan, which were collected by Dr. R. 0. Cunningham when acting as naturalist on 

 H.M.S. "Nassau." 1 In all the crania from the Messier Channel, the basi-occipito- 

 sphenoid joint was ossified, and in one specimen only (No. 4) was the intra-sphenoidal 

 joint uuossified. The Desolation Island specimens were aged crania and in all pro- 

 bability males. 2 The dimensions of all these skulls are recorded in Table VII. 



Table VII. — Crania of South American Fur-Seal. 



The Desolation Island skulls and Nos. 1 and 3 from the Messier Channel possessed 

 occipital crests and sagittal crests extending more or less forward into the frontal region, 

 the greatest elevation of which was 10 mm. In No. 4, a younger male from the 

 Messier Channel, and in the adult female, these crests were scarcely developed at all. 



1 These skulls were presented by Dr. Cunningham to the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh. 

 See his work already cited on p. 30 for an account of the seals in this locality. 



s Some years ago I left these skulls from Desolation Island, for examination, with the late Dr. J. E. Gray, who 

 made some notes on them in the Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist, vol. iv. ser. 4, p. 264, 1869. He referred them to the 

 species which he had described as " Euotaria nigrescens, the usual Fur-Seal of the Falkland Islands and other parts of the 

 «oast of South- West America," the same animal as is described in the text as Arctocephalus australis. 



(zool. chall. exp. — part Lxviii.— 1887.) Yyy 6 



