124 "Royal Society : — 



the banks of the River Salado, and was presented to the College by 

 that gentleman, through the instrumentality of the late President of 

 the College, J. F. South, Esq. 



It arrived in England in an extremely broken and mutilated con- 

 dition; but, by the exercise of great care and patience, Mr. Waterhouse 

 Hawkins, to whom the President and Council of the Royal College 

 of Surgeons entrusted the task of adjusting the scattered fragments, 

 has succeeded in restoring to their natural condition the greater part 

 of the vertebral column, the limbs, and much of the head. In the 

 execution of this laborious undertaking Mr. Hawkins has had, from 

 time to time, all the anatomical aid that Mr. Flower, the Conservator 

 of the College Museum, and T could afford him ; and the authorities 

 of the College have finally entrusted me, as one of the Professors of 

 the College, with the duty of describing the specimen. 



This duty I propose to discharge by preparing a full description 

 of the skeleton in a memoir to be presented (accompanied by a 

 draught of the requisite illustrations) to the Royal Society. But as 

 the preparation of such a memoir will require some time, I wish, at 

 present, to lay before the Royal Society a preliminary account of 

 those particulars in the structure of this animal which must interest 

 anatomists in general as much as the special student of the fossil 

 Edentata, in the hope that the notice may appear in the ' Proceed- 

 ings' of the Society. 



The mass of bony fragments which arrived from South America 

 has afforded material for the reconstruction of the carapace, and of 

 the following parts of the skeleton : — the anterior moiety of the skull 

 with the entire palate ; the mandible ; some of the cervical, and the 

 greater part of the dorsal, lumbar, sacral and coccygeal vertebrae, with 

 vertebral and sternal ribs ; the pelvis and the hind limbs ; part of the 

 scapula, and an entire fore limb. And there can be no doubt that 

 all these remains belong to one and the same animal, as no duplicate 

 bones have been discovered, nor any which there is the least reason 

 to believe belong to a different individual. This circumstance gives 

 a particular value to the present specimen, apart from the fact that, 

 notwithstanding the researches of Professor Owen, of D'Alton, of 

 Lund, and of Nodot, our knowledge of the structure of the anterior 

 part of the skull, of the vertebral column and pelvis, and of the fore 

 limb of Glyptodon and its immediate allies, is either nil or extremely 

 imperfect. I now proceed to note the more important and the novel 

 anatomical peculiarities which it reveals. 



Of the skull the new specimen exhibits the anterior moiety, from 

 the anterior boundary of the cranial cavity to the anterior end of the 

 nasal bones, together with the almost entire bones of the face and 

 the lower jaw ; it thus furnishes a nearly complete supplement to the 

 fragmentary cranium, consisting of the brain-case and the nasal bones, 

 witli the zygomatic processes, formerly described by Professor Owen 

 as a part of Glyptodon clavipes, and now set up in the College Mu- 

 seum, together with a carapace, a tail, and a hind foot, as the typical 

 example of that species*. In the form of the frontal bone, of the 

 * The parts thus combined together were not found so associated, and the 



