CROCODILIA. 113 



which now exists in a locaUty nearest to Great Britain, and also of an individual of that 

 same species which had lived at a remote period ; and I have been favoured by the 

 kindness of my esteemed friend Philip Duncan, Esq., Fellow of New College, Oxford, and 

 Conservator of the Ashmolean Museum, with the opportunity of examining the bones of a 

 mummified Crocodile from a sarcophagus at Thebes, in that collection at Oxford. Two 

 views of the skull of this old Egyptian Crocodile are given in PI. A 2. The total length 

 of the skull from the bone marked 28 to the end of 22, is twice the breadth of the back 

 part of the skull. The upper apertures of the temporal fossa are subcircular ; the point of 

 the squamosal (27) projects into the lateral aperture. The breadth of the back part of the 

 sculptured cranial platform (8,8), is less by one fourth than the breadth of the skull anterior 

 to the orbits. The breadth of the interorbital space is nearly equal to the transverse 

 diameter of the orbit. The points of the nasals (15) project into the external nostril. 

 The postpalatal apertures reach as far forwards as the seventh tooth, counting from 

 the hindmost; there are nineteen alveoli on each side of the upper jaw, the five 

 anterior teeth being lodged in the premaxillary, which is perforated by the first tooth 

 of the lower jaw. 



GeofFroy St. Hilaire has applied the old Egyptian name l.ovyoQ to the mummified 

 Crocodiles of that country ; but there is no good specific character which distinguishes 

 them from the modern Crocodiles of the Nile, to which Cuvier has given the name of 

 Crocod'dus vulgaris. 



Cuvier appears to have first called the attention of palaeontologists to the remains 

 of Crocodilia in the Eocene clay forming the Isle of Sheppy, in the last volume of the 

 second edition of his great work on the ' Ossemens Fossiles,' p. 165, 1824. He there 

 specifies a third cervical vertebra, which was obtained by M. G. A. Deluc, at Sheppy, 

 and of which Cuvier made a drawing at Geneva ; he says it much resembles the 

 corresponding vertebra in one of our li^^ng Crocodiles, and might have come from an 

 individual about five feet in length. " M. Deluc," he adds, " found very near it a 

 much smaller vertebra, which I recognised as belonging to a monitor or some allied 

 genus."* 



Our knowledge of the Eocene Crocodiles of Sheppy received a remarkable accession 

 at the publication of the highly interesting and instructive ' Bridgewatcr Treatise' of 

 Dr. Buckland, in which he states that " true Ci'ocodiles, with a short and broad snout, 

 like that of the Caiman and the Alligator, appear, for the first time, in strata of the 

 tertiary periods,.in which the remains of mammalia abound. . . . One of these," he adds, 

 " found by Mr. Spencer in the London Clay of the Isle of Sheppy, is engraved PI. 25', 

 fig. 1 ," and the name ' Crocodilus SpemerV is appended to that figure. 



* Could this have been a vertebra of the large serpent, which I have subsequently described under the 

 name of Palceophis ? I have not as yet met with a single lacertian vertebra from Sbeppy. If the collection 

 of M. Deluc be stLU preserved at Geneva, the vertebra in question might be compared with the figures of the 

 Palceojihus toliapicus, 'Ophidia,' PI. 1. 



