2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM. VOL. 62. 
During that year three full-grown specimens of a musk turtle were 
donated to the United States National Museum by Dr. O. P. Hay, 
who had collected them many years before near Vicksburg, Missis- 
sippi. It was recognized, though too late to be incorporated in the 
Check List, that they belonged to a species of which the National 
Museum then did not possess any specimens. Closer examination 
proved them to be true Sternotherus carinatus, and made it clear 
that all the other specimens so named, which we had from Georgia 
and Florida, were specifically different. Having now, through the 
courtesy of Dr. Thomas Barbour, been able to compare our material 
with Agassiz’s cotypes in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, it is 
evident that the Georgia-Florida specimens are identical with his 
Goniochelys minor and represent a very distinct species which should 
now be known as Sternotherus minor (Agassiz). 
The essential differences between S. carinatus and S. minor are: 1, 
the flat keelless sides of S. carinatus, which form a nearly straight 
slope from the sharp central keel to the marginals, while in S. minor 
this slope is much more arched, the convexity being usually empha- 
sized by a sharp lateral keel on each side; and 2, the absence, or 
rarely vestigial presence, of a gular in S. carinatus, while in 8. minor 
it is always distinct. 
An examination of the published records of the specimens attrib- 
uted to S. carinatus resulted in the discovery that nearly all belong 
to S. minor or to the supposed southern form of S. odoratus known 
as tristychus, and that 8S. minor occurs principally in Georgia, AJabama, 
and part of Florida. The reported occurence of S. carinatus in the 
eastern part of Tennessee! was therefore of particular interest, and, 
thanks to the courtesy of Dr. Henry Fowler, of the Philadelphia 
Academy Museum, I have had the opportunity of examining the 
specimen collected by Mr. Rhoads in the Emory River at Harriman, 
Roane County, Tennessee, a secondary affluent of the Tennessee 
River. It is unquestionably a young S. minor with three-keeled 
carapace and gular. From Mr. Rhoads’s description of the specimen 
as having ‘“‘two black bands pass back from the eye across and above 
tympanum and join on foreneck”’ it has been surmised that the spec- 
imen might rather belong to true S. odoratus, a striped head pattern 
being characteristic of the latter. But the irregularly curving dusky 
lines exhibited by Rhoads’s specimen are entirely different from the 
dark transocular band, bordered above and below by a narrow well- 
defined yellow line, of S. odoratus. In fact, it is the yellow lines of 
the latter, not the dark lines, which are characteristic of the young 
S. odoratus, and of these there is no trace in the Emory River speci- 
men. 
1Rhoads, Proce. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia, 1895, p. 384 
