PLEISTOCENE JAGUARS McCRADY ET AL. 501 



include the parts that would make possible an easy and certain identi- 

 fication of species, but it can be only from one of two — Smilodon cali- 

 fomicus or Panthera atrox^ most likely the latter. 



Another error in Leidy's paper, and one that has misled later 

 authors, is his assignment of this material to the Pliocene (not Miocene 

 as Simpson says) , thus allowing them to overlook comparisons with 

 Pleistocene cats. This is what happened in the next pertinent paper, 

 in which O. P. Hay (1919) described and figured an upper left 

 carnassial from the No. 2 bed at Vero, Fla. This he named Felis 

 veronis, dismissing the possibility of its belonging to Felis augiLstus 

 with the statement, ^''Felis augustus^ besides belonging to the Arikaree 

 of the Tertiary, differs in various ways from the "Vero specimen." We 

 have compared the two and are confident that Hay must have been 

 convinced primarily by the supposed difference in stratigraphic 

 horizons. The structural differences between the specimens are in 

 features too variable in other cats to warrant serious consideration. 



G. G. Simpson described (1929) several isolated teeth from Semi- 

 nole Field, Fla., as belonging to Felis veronis. And in 1928 or 1929, 

 while collecting at Melbourne, Fla., Dr. J. W. Gidley discovered a 

 right lower jaw with canine and P3-M1, two carnassials from differ- 

 ent individuals, and one lower molar, all from cats of this same gen- 

 eral range of dimension. He did not publish these finds, and only the 

 lower jaw has ever been mentioned in the literature. This lower jaw 

 (U.S.N.M. No. 11470) was described and figured by G. G. Simpson 

 (1941b). 



Di-s. J. W. Gidley and C. L. Gazin (1938) described from Cumber- 

 land Cave, Md., a scapholunar, two calcanea, an astragalus, a second 

 metacarpal, and third and fifth metatarsals, which they assigned to 

 ''''Felis near atroxy Simpson examined them and concluded (1941b) 

 that they belonged to some group distinct from jaguar, puma, or 

 atrox^ but that, "supposing all to represent a single species," they 

 were more like puma than anything else. 



It does not seem legitimate to lump these bones together as Simpson 

 does in his figure 7.^ The P* included there was assigned by the 

 original authors to the fossil puma Felis inexpectata and was never 

 considered to belong to the same individual, or species, as the tarsal 

 bones, for instance. It was separately cataloged as U.S.N.M. No. 

 11890 instead of U.S.N.M. No. 12840. Furthermore, even those 

 cataloged together as U.S.N.M. No. 12840 clearly include at least two 

 individuals, probably three, and probably two different species. The 

 metatarsal III, scapholunar, two calcanea, and astragalus, are all 

 distinctively jaguaroid and we would accept them as Panthera augusta, 

 or, as the original authors said, "near atroxy But the two calcanea 



^See footnote 8, last paragrraph (p. 507). 



