134 



MUSEUM OF ANIMATED NATURE. 



[Newts. 



of dislike and apprehension. Much in its history 

 vet remains to be cleared up ; we know nothing of 

 Its tadpole state or of its transfoimations. Its 



general colour is slaty, with dark spots, and a dark j 



line through the eyei>. < 



With respect to the Sieboldtia maxima of the i 



Prince of Canino(.Me)ralol)atrachus,T8chudi; Crvp- i 



tobranchus, Van der Hoevea;, it may be described | 



as a gigantic salamander, three feet in length, inha- i 



biting a lake on a ba^ltic mountain in Japan, where ' 



the species was discovered by Dr. Von Sieboldt, who : 



bioauht away two individuals, a male and female, i 



but the former devoured the latter during the passage | 



homewards ; the survivor arrived in Leyden, where : 



it was lately living, and perhaps is so still. It feeds , 



on fishes. In this reptile, as in the true newts, the | 



slils of the branchial apertures are closed, and not | 



open at in Menopoma. In the Zool. Proceeds, for I 



March 13, 1S38, will be found the notice of a letter | 



from .M. Van der Iloeven respecting it, with some i 

 observations by Professor Owen. 



23r)l, 2352. — The Gigantic Fossil Saxauaxdkk ! 



{AtidrUif Scheiiclueri. Tschudi). 



From the Sieboldlia we turn to the fossil relics of | 

 n closely allied species, which has been extinct for I 

 ages. 1 



11 was in the Philosophical Transactions for 172C, ] 

 that Dr. Scneuchzer published a short account of a | 

 li.is.sil received by him from the (Eningen beds (the I 

 iiiiocene period of Lyell). which he firmly believed I 

 to be that of a human being, and na such was it { 

 received by the naturalists of his day. It was the \ 

 " homo dil'uvii testis," a rare relic of one of that ac- \ 

 cursed people buried by the flood, or, to use the i 

 words of Sc-heuclizer in his ' Physica Sacra,' " \fl- \ 

 ^arar malcdiotie illius et aquis sepultsc gentis." 



The ruling passion of this physician was to collect ' 

 fossils which might be considered as evidences of the 

 deluge ; hence, carried away by his favourite theory, 

 when he looked at the fossil in question, he forgot the 

 osteology of the human body, or viewed tfie bones 

 imbedded in the stone through the distorted optics 

 of an excited imagination. In 1755, another spe- 

 cimen came into the possession of Gesner, and though 

 he rejiudiated the idea of the relics beins; those of 

 man, yet he fell into an error in attributing them to 

 a species of fish (Silurus Glanis, Linn.). A third 

 and more complete specimen, now in the British 

 Museum, came into the hands of Dr. Ammann of 

 Zurich, a fisruie of which was published by Karg in 

 the ' Memoirs of the Society of Naturalists of 

 Suabia,' and still under the idea of its being a fossil 

 silurus. That this opinion was erroneous, .Jiiger 

 demonstrated by placintr a figure of the Silurus 

 Glanis by the side of Karg's figure of the fossil, 

 and at once dispelled the illusion. On looking at 

 Karg's figure, Cuvier at once perceived that the 

 characters were those of the Salamandridae, an 

 opinion which had been entertained by M. Kiel- 

 meyer and by Camper, who, as .liiger says, observed 

 in a letter to Burton, that a petrified lizard has been 

 able to pass for an anthropolite (fossil man). In 1811, 

 Cuvier visited Haarlem, and obtained permission to 

 work upnn the stone which contained Scheuchzer's 

 " homo diluvii testis." He placed the skeleton of a 

 salamander before the operatore, who, as the chisel 

 chipped away the stone, exposing the bones to view, 

 beheld with delight the predictions of Cuvier veri- 

 fied. The remains were indeed those of a gigantic 

 salamander, to which the Sieboldtia bears the 

 nearest affinity. 



From this fossil form among the Salamandridae, we 

 must now turn to another, namely, the Labyrin- 

 thodon of Professor Owen (Salamandroides, Jiiger ; 

 Mastodonsaurus, Phytosaurus, Chirotherium) ; and 

 to render the subject clear, we shall first advert to 

 Fiir. 23.55, a transverse section of the tooth of Laby- 

 rinthodon, with a portion of the same magnified. 

 Premising that the reptilian remains in question 

 occur in the Warwick sandstone, and in the Keuper 

 of Germany, we shall take an extract from the ' Pro- 

 ceeds. Geol. Society of I>ond.' for 1841. 



"Before he proceeded to describe the fossils 

 forming the immediateobject of his paper, Mr. Owen 

 showed that the genus Phytosaurus was established 

 on the casts of the sockets of the teeth of Mastodon- 

 saurus, and that the latter generic appellation ought 

 not to be retained, because it recalls unavoidably the 

 idea of the mammalian genus Mastodon, or else a 

 mammilloid form of the tooth, whereas all the teeth 

 of the genus so designated are originally, and for 

 the greater number, permanently of a cuspidate and 

 not of a mammilloid form ; and because the second 

 element of the word, saurus, indicates a false affinity, 

 the remains beloni;ing not to the Saurian, but to the 

 Batrachian onler of reptiles. For these reasons, and 

 believing that he had discovered the true and pecu- 

 liarly distinctive denial characters of the fossil, he 

 proposed to designate the genus by the term Laby- 

 linthodon. 



" The only portions of the Batrachian found in the 

 Keuper of Germany which have hitherto been de- 



scribed, consist of teeth, a fragment of the skull, and 

 a few broken vertebrs : and in the Warwick sand- 

 stone, of teeth only. In this memoir, therelore, Mr. 

 Owen confined his attention to a comparison of the 

 dental structure of the Continental and English 

 remains." 



Professor Owen then enters into the minutie of 

 structural details, and concludes by observing that 

 " if on the one hand geology has in this instance 

 really derived any aid from minute anatomy, on the 

 other hand in no instance has the comparative ana- 

 tomist been more indebted to geology, than for the 

 fossils which have revealed the most singular and 

 complicated modification of dental structure hitherto 

 known, and of which not the slightest conception 

 could have been gained from an investigation, how- 

 ever close and extensive, of the teeth of existing 

 animals." 



Referring to the Fig. 2355, we may observe that 

 the small circle shows a section of the tooth of Laby- 

 rinthodon Jaegeri, Owen, of the natural size; the 

 other is a quarter of the same circle magnified; a, 

 is the pulp-cavity from which the processes of pulp 

 and dentine radiate ; b l>, the cement. From the 

 tooth of Labyrinthodon, we may now pass to Figs. 

 2.35G and 21)57, the relics and foot-jirints of a species 

 termed Labyrinthodon I'achysrnathus. Impressions 

 made by the footsteps of animals, ripple-marks, and 

 little pits formed by the drops of a heavy shower, 

 have been found at different times on the surface of 

 various strata of sandstone, both in this and other 

 countries, as well as in beds of comparatively recent 

 formation in various parts of the kingdom ; for ex- 

 ample, in Pembrokeshire, on making excavations 

 for a dock at Penibray, the tracks of deer and large 

 oxen were discovered on a layer of clay underlying a 

 bed of peat, and also on the surface of the peat itself 

 below a bed of silt, bones of the animals themselves 

 occurring in the peat. We learn also Irom Dr. 

 Buckland, that in excavations made for a harbour 

 near Margam Burrows, on the east of Neath, foot- 

 marks of deer have been observed. With respect 

 to ancient strata, tracks of tortoises have been found 

 impressed on the sandstone in the quarry of Corn- 

 Cockle Muir, Dumfriesshire, as described in Trans. 

 Royal Soc. Edin., 1828: and in 1831, Mr. G. P. 

 Scrope found numerous foot-prints of small animals, 

 probably Crustacea, and ripple-marks in the beds of 

 forest marble near Bath. The impressions of birds' 

 feet have been discovered on the surface of sandstone 

 in the valley of the Connecticut, and fossil bones of 

 birds have occurred in the strata of Tilgate forest, 

 antecedent to the chalk formation. To come, how- 

 ever, to the foot-prints of the Labyrinthodon, or as 

 it was provisionally termed by Kaup, the Chiro- 

 therium, from the supposed resemblance in the 

 marks both of the fore and hind feet to those of a 

 human hand, and which he thought might have been 

 derived from some quadruped allied to the Marsu- 

 pialia. 



It was in Saxony at the village of Hesseburg 

 near Hildburghausen, that these fossil footsteps 

 were first discovered in several quarries of grey 

 quartzose sandstone alternating with beds of red 

 sandstone, nearly of the use of the red sandstone of 

 Corn-Cockle Muir. Dr. Hohnbaum and Professor 

 Kaup state that those impressions of feet are partly 

 concave and partly in relief; the depressions are 

 described as being upon the upper surfaces of the 

 sandstone slabs, but the footmarks in relief are only 

 upon the lower surfaces, and cover the depressions. 

 In short, the footmarks in relief are natural casts 

 formed in the subjacent (ootsteps as in moulds. 

 On one slab, six feet long by five feet wide, many 

 footsteps of more than one animal and of various 

 sizes occur. The larger impressions, which seem to 

 be those of the hind foot, are generally eight inches 

 in length and five in width, and one was twelve 

 inches long. Near each large footstep, and at a 

 regular distance (about an inch and a half) belbre 

 it, a smaller print of a fore foot, four inches long 

 and three feet wide, occurs. The footsteps follow 

 each other in pail's, each pair in the same line, at 

 intervals of fourteen inches from pair to pair. The 

 large as well as the small steps show the great toes 

 alternately on the ris;ht and left side ; each step 

 makes the print of five toes, the first or great toe 

 being bent inward like a thumb. Thougii the fore 

 and hind foot differ so much in size, they are nearly 

 similar in form. 



But these footsteps are not confined to foreign 

 lands, and within the last few years able observers 

 have contributed largely to this interesting subject. 

 Dr. Buckland thus sums up the evidence oblained 

 in this country : — Near Liverpool Mr. Cunningham 

 has successfully continued his researches begun in 

 18;J8, respecting the foot.steps of Chirotherium and 

 other animals in the new red sandstone at Storeton 

 Hill, on the west .side of the Mersey. These foot- 

 steps occur on five consecutive beds of clay in the 

 same quarry ; the clay-beds are very thin : and 

 having received the iniiiressious of the feet, afforded 

 a series of moulds in which casts were taken by 



the succeeding deposits of sand, now converted 

 into sandstone. The casts of the feet are salient in 

 high relief on the lower surlaces of the t)eds of sand- 

 stone, giving exact models of the feet and toes and 

 claws of these mysterious animals, of which scarcely 

 a single bone or tooth has yet been found, although 

 we are assured by the evidence before us of tlie 

 certainty of their existence at the time when the 

 new red sandstone was in process of deposition. 

 Further discoveries of the footsteps of Chirotherium 

 and five or six smaller leptiles in the new led 

 sandstone of Cheshire, Warwickshire, and Salop, 

 have been brought before us by Sir P. Egeiton, 

 Mr. J. Taylor, jun., Mr. Strickland, and Dr. Ward. 

 Mr. Cunningham, in a sequel to his paper on the 

 footmarks at Storeton, has described impres<ioiis 

 on the same slabs with them, derived from drops 

 of rain that fell upon thin laminae of clay interposed 

 between the beds of .sand. The clay impre.-sea ivilh 

 these prints of rain-drops acted as a mould, which 

 transferred the form of every drop to the lower 

 surface of the next bed of sand deposited upon it, 

 so that entire surfaces of several strata in the same 

 quarry are respectively covered with moulds and 

 casts of drops of rain that fell whilst the strata weie 

 in process of formation. On the surface of one 

 stratum at Storeton, impressed with large footmarks 

 of a Chirotherium, the depth of the holes formed 

 by the rain-drops on different parts of the same 

 footstep has vaiied with the unequal auiouut of 

 pressure on the clay and sand, by the salient cushions 

 and retiring hollows of the creature's foot ; and 

 from the constancy of this phenomenon upon an 

 entire series of footmarks in along continuous track, 

 we know that this rain fell alter the animal had 

 passed. The equable size of the cnsts of large drop* 

 that cover the entire surface of the slab, except lu 

 the parts impressed by the cushions of the feet, 

 record the falling of a shower of heavy drops on the 

 day in which this huge animal had marched along 

 the ancient strand: hemispherical impressions of 

 small drops, upon another stratum, show it to have 

 been exposed to only a sprinkling of gentle rain 

 that fell at a moment of calm. In one small slab 

 of new red sandstone found by Dr. Ward near 

 Shrewt-bury, we have a combination of proofs as to 

 meteoric, hydrostatic, and locomotive phenomena, 

 which occurred at a time incalculably remote, i:i 

 the atmosphere, the water, and the movements of 

 animals, and from which we infer, with the certainty 

 of cumulative circumstantial evidence, the direction 

 of the wind, the depth and course of the wafer, and 

 the quarter towards which the animals were passing ; 

 the latter is indicated by the direction of the foot- 

 steps which form their tracks; the size and cur- 

 vatures of the ripi)l>:-marks on the sand, now con- 

 verted to sandstone, show the depth and direction 

 of the current; the oblique impressions of the rain- 

 drops register the point from which the wind was 

 blowing at or about the time when the animals were 

 passing." 



The Address from which the above passage is 

 taken was delivered at the anniversary of ilie Geo- 

 logical Society of London on the 21sl February, 

 1840 ; and at that time all was conjecture as to the 

 nature of the animal called Chirotherium. Pro- 

 fessor Owen'spaper, read on the 20ih January, 1841, 

 proved the existence of a gigantic Batrachian at 

 the period when the new red sandstone was formed. 

 Scarcely was that memoir communicated, when 

 additional materials of the highest impoitance were 

 brought forward by the liberal possessors of them, 

 and the result was a second paper, read belbre the 

 Geological Society of London on the 24th of February, 

 in which three species of Labyrintiiodon were 

 defined, and evidence relating to the ichnology* of ] 

 those extinct I5atrachians was adduced, which may 

 be briefly stated as Ibllows : — 



1st. Proof from the skeleton that Labyrinthodon 

 had hind extremities much larger than the anterior 

 extremities. 



2nd. That the foot-prints of Chirotherium are at 

 least as much like those of certain toads as those of 

 any other animals. 



3:d. That the size of the known species of Laby- 

 rinthodon corresponds with the size of the foot- 

 £ tints of the different species of Clurollierium : e. ff. 

 abyriuthodon Jaegeri, with the Ibot-pnnt of Cliiro- 

 theruim Hercules (Egeiton) ; Labuinlhodon pa- 

 chygnathus, with tiie foot-marks of the common 

 Chirotherium; and Labyrinthodon leplognathus, 

 with the impressions of the smaller batrachian 

 figured in the memoir by Mr. Murchison and Mr. 

 Strickland. 



4th. Labyrinthodon occurs in the new red sand- 

 stone strata, to which Chirotherian impressions are 

 peculiar. And 



Lastly, no remains of animals that could have 

 lell such imijipssions as those of the Chirotherium 

 have been found in these strata, except the remains 

 of the Labyrinlhodons. 



♦ 'Ixfos, a footstep ; \iyos, a discourse. 



