182 ON REMAINS OF AN EXTINCT SAURIAN, 
our river channels far above tidal influences and even wanders 
into adjacent lagoons. Indeed, from the fact that these reptiles 
have a longer specific life than animals more highly organised 
it might have been almost inferred that the old would prove to 
have been the direct progenitor of one or other of the recent 
crocodiles ; at any rate, the most we hada right to expect was 
that it might be specifically distinct. If then it should ultimately 
appear that the fossil animal was so different to both the living 
ones, as to require us to place it in a distinct and geographically 
remote family, it comes before us with enhanced interest— 
enhanced, not so much by the bare fact as by the bearing of the 
fact on the geographical distribution of life in the past as 
compared with that in the present age. 
,Every part of the Condamine drift which has been searched 
during the last two years at intervals, by the collectors attached 
to the Queensland Museum, has been found to yield traces of 
crocodilian life. Teeth and scutes have occurred invariably 
and in moderate profusion—vertebras also, but in comparative 
paucity: limb-bones with still less frequency: while rarest of 
all, until lately, have been the parts most needed as guides to 
the relations of the quondam owners with the indigenous 
members of the order now living. Portions of skull were indeed 
amongst the earliest of these relics to present themselves, but, 
they appeared in fragments so far characterless as merely to 
whet the suspicion already formed by the structure of the 
dermal scutes, that the near affinities of this saurian were not 
altogether the same as those of the members of the order now 
inhabiting Australia. § Recently, however, more instructive 
cranial and mandibular fossils have been met with, and it may 
now be no longer premature to invite attention to the evidence 
they give in favour of two conclusions—first that the saurian 
member of the past fauna was not identical with either of the 
two crocodilians in the present one ; second that it was not even 
nearly allied to them. 
