THE 



FOSSIL REPTILIA OF THE LIASSIC FORMATIONS. 



CHAPTER III. Oedee— DINOSAURIA, Owen. 

 Genus — Scelidosaueus, Owen. 



In the year 1858 a few fragmentary fossils of limb-bones were submitted to my 

 inspection by James Harrison, Esq., of Charmouth, Dorsetshire, obtained from the 

 upper part of the " lower Lias," near that place. They included portions of a 

 femur and of a tibia, in which the texture of the wall and the size of the cavity of 

 the shaft showed them to have been parts of a Saurian of more terrestrial habits 

 than any of those which had been previously discovered in those liassic deposits : 

 traces, moreover, of the extent and direction of certain processes, although 

 broken away in the fossils, were discernible, which led me to suspect they 

 belonged to a reptile alUed to Iguanodon. I therefore briefly notified the fact 

 of a liassic Dinosaur in my ' Palaeontology,' ^ and indicated the animal by the 

 generic name SceUdosaurus.^ 



The femur of the Iguanodon, as shown in vol i, p. 310, vol. ii, PI. 20, is 

 characterised by the deep and narrow fissure dividing a compressed external 

 trochanter from the head of the bone, and by a process from the middle of the 

 shaft, on the inner side, opposite to the part where the " third trochanter " 

 projects in some of the large herbivorous mammals {Perissodadi/Ia). Both these 

 characters were repeated in the specimen of the shaft of the femur first submitted 

 to me ; but the shaft, viewed sideways, showed a more decided sigmoid flexure 

 than in the Iguanodon, and the fissure between the great trochanter and the 



1 8vo. ed., 1860, p. 258. 



2 Gr., (TKeXis, limb, aavpns, lizard; from the indications of greater power in the hind legs than in 

 most Saurians, 



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