158 Geological Society — 
striking one, and has created great surprise in those to whom I have 
shown it. 
GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 
[Continued from p. 78.] 
December 14, 1859.—Prof. J. Phillips, President, in the Chair, 
The following communications were read :— 
1. “On some Remains of Polyptychodon from Dorking.” By 
Prof. Owen, F.R.S., F.G.S. 
Referring to the genus of Saurians which he had founded in 1841 
on certain large detached teeth from the Cretaceous beds of Kent 
and Sussex, and which genus, in reference to the many-ridged or 
folded character of the enamel of those teeth, he had proposed to 
call Polyptychodon, Prof. Owen noticed the successive discoveries of 
portions of jaws, one showing the thecodont implantation of those 
teeth, which, with the shape and proportions of the teeth, led him to 
suspect the crocodilian affinities of Polyptychodon ; and the subse- 
quent discovery of bones in a Lower Greensand quarry at Hythe, 
which, on the hypothesis of their having belonged to Polyptychodon, 
had led him to suspect that the genus conformed to the Plesio- 
sauroid type. 
The fossils now exhibited by Mr. G. Cubitt of Denbies, consisted 
of part of the cranium (showing a large foramen parietale), frag- 
ments of the upper and lower jaws, and teeth of the Polyptychodon 
interruptus, from the Lower Chalk of Dorking, and afforded further 
evidence of the plesiosauroid affinities of the genus. Professor Owen 
remarked that in a collection of fossils from the Upper Greensand 
near Cambridge, now in the Woodwardian Museum, and in another 
collection of fossils from the Greensand beds near Kursk in. Russia, 
submitted to the Professor’s examination by Col. Kiprianoff, there 
are teeth of Polyptychodon, associated with plesiosauroid vertebrae 
of the same proportional magnitude, and with portions of large limb+ 
bones, without medullary cavity, and of plesiosauroid shape. 
Thus the evidence at present obtained respecting this huge, but 
hitherto problematical, carnivorous Saurian of the Cretaceous period 
seemed to prove it to be a marine one, more closely adhering to the 
prevailing type of the Sea-lizards of the great mesozoic epoch, then 
drawing to its close, than to the Mosasaurus of the Upper Chalk, 
which, by its vertebral, palatal, and dental characters, seemed to 
foreshadow the Saurian type to follow, 
Prof. Owen exhibited also drawings of specimens in the Wood- 
wardian Museum and in the Collection of Mr. W. Harris, of Charing, 
which show the mode and degree of use or abrasion to which the 
teeth of Polyptychodon had been subject. 
2. “On some Fossils from near Bahia, South America.” By 
§. Allport, Esq. 
The south-west point of the hill on which the Fort of Montserrate 
is built, in Bahia Bay, exhibits a section of alternating beds of con- 
glomerate, sandstone, and shale; in the last Mr. Allport discovered 
