452 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



The preliminary paper is published in the Bulletin of the American 

 Museum (xxii. art. 8). 



Of very considerable interest, on distributional grounds, is 

 the description by the second of the two naturalists last men- 

 tioned (in the Proceedings of the U.S. Mus. No. 1447) of the 

 skull of a ruminant nearly allied to the musk-ox, obtained during 

 irrigation works at Zuni, New Mexico. For this ruminant the 

 new generic name Liops is proposed. 



Despite the abundance of their skulls and teeth, complete 

 skeletons of the Creodonts or "ruminating hogs" of the North 

 American Oligoceni are very rare ; and it is therefore satisfactory 

 to learn that a skeleton of the smallest species, Merycoidodon 

 gracilis — an animal the size of an ordinary fox — has been 

 set up in the American Museum. (See C. W. Gilmore, Proc. 

 U.S. Nat. Mus. xxxi. p. 513.) 



Not much importance can be attached to Mr. J. W. Gidley's 

 notice of the occurrence of remains of an extinct racoon in a 

 Californian cave-deposit of Pleistocene age {Proc. U.S. Nat. Mus. 

 xxix. pp. 553, 554); but if he is right in identifying a carnivore 

 allied to Amphicyon in the same deposit, we have a discovery of 

 very considerable interest, considering that in Europe the genus 

 is of middle Tertiary age. 



Remains of fossil seals from the Calvert Miocene of Maryland 

 and Oregon have formed the subject of two papers during 

 the year. In the first of these (Proc. U.S. Nat. Mus. No. 1475), 

 Mr. F. W. True describes a humerus from Maryland, which he 

 regards as representing a new genus, Leptophoca. To the same 

 genus he refers a fossil seal from Bessarabia, described in i860 

 by Nordmann. The subject of the second paper {University of 

 Oregon Bulletin, iii. suppl. No. 3) is a seal-skull from Oregon, 

 which is regarded by its describer, Mr. T. Condon, as repre- 

 senting a genus (Desmatophoca) with characters intermediate 

 between those of the Phocidai and the Otariidec. It is remark- 

 able that no reference is made to a paper published a year 

 previously (Smithsonian Miscel. Collect, xlvi.), in which Mr. True 

 described the skull of a seal from the same State and formation, 

 referred to the Otariidec under the name of Pantoleon. So far 

 as the writer can see, there appears no reason why these 

 skulls should not belong to different sexes of one and the 

 same species. They are the oldest remains of sea-lions at 

 present known. 



