FOSSIL REMAINS. 59 



" The tusks in the fossil curved downwardly in a diverging 

 manner, and were about four inches distant from each other at 

 their emergence from the alveoli, and ten inches at their tips. 

 The remaining tusk in the specimen is thirteen inches long 

 from its alveolar border, and in this latter position it is three 

 inches in diameter antero-posteriorly and one and three quar- 

 ters inches transversely . . . ." The other specimen, from. 

 New Jersey, mentioned above, he says is also "unchanged from 

 its original texture, but is brown from the infiltration of oxide 

 of iron. It also belonged to an old individual, as all the 

 sutures are obliterated, and the third molars together with the 

 greater part of their alveoli are gone. In its anatomical de- 

 tails the specimen agrees with the corresponding portion of 

 Professor Frazer's specimen, except it is an inch and a half 

 broader in the position of the canine alveoli, and the antero- 

 posterior diameter of the tusk is rather less."* Of both these 

 specimens, Dr. Leidy gives figures, and they agree entirely with 

 corresponding parts of the existing North Atlantic species. 

 Dr. Leidy, however, notes differences between these specimens 

 and those of the Walrus of the North Pacific. 



Dr. Leidy adds : " An important question now arises in rela- 

 tion to the age or geological period to which the three Walrus 

 skulls, thus discovered on the coast of New Jersey and Virginia, 

 belong. As they appear to be of the same species as the recent 

 Trichechus rosmarus, w r hich once lived in great numbers in the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence, they are most probably the remains of 

 individuals that were once floated upon fields of ice southerly, 

 and left on the present United States coast. Or, perhaps they 

 may be the remains of the same species which probably during 

 the glacial period extended its habitation very far south of the 

 latitude in which it has been found in the historic period."! In 

 view of the now well-known former extension of the habitat of 

 the Moose, Caribou, Eeindeer, Musk Ox, and other northern 

 mammals, southward to Kentucky, the latter hypothesis seems 

 the more probable one, and that the species in glacial times 

 inhabited the eastern coast of the United States southward to 

 Virginia, if not even beyond this point. 



More recently, Dr. Leidy has announced the occurrence of 

 Walrus remains in the phosphate beds of Ashley Eiver, South 

 Carolina, and has described and figured a tusk from that locality. 



* Trans Amer. Phil. Soc., vol. xi, pp. 83, 84. 

 t Ibid., p. 84. 



