2^ KANSAS UNIVERSITY SCIENCE BULLETIN. 



Doctor Jaeger's discovery, however, was that of the form 

 Pygopterus, the history of which is given below. 



The literature on fossil Amphibia for the next twenty years 

 following Jaeger's last mentioned paper deals almost entirely 

 with the Tertiary Amphibia, although in 1844 and 1845 Her- 

 mann von Meyer published some interesting papers on the more 

 ancient amphibians. It is interesting to note that in von 

 Meyer's "System der fossilen Saurier," 1845, he does not men- 

 tion a single temnospondylous amphibian. 



Our knowledge of the Temnospondylia dates from the year 

 1847, in which year Dr. August Goldfuss described Archego- 

 saurus, the first known and for many years the only representa- 

 tive of this order of amphibians. Doctor Goldfuss gave as the 

 title of the paper in which he described Archegosaunos "Ueber 

 das selteste der mit Bestimmtheit erkannten Reptilien." It will 

 thus be noticed from the literature that the early writers re- 

 garded the labyrinthodonts and their allies as reptiles. It was 

 Quenstedt who in 1850 made the first contention that "Die 

 Mastodonsaurier im gruenen Keuper Sandstein Wurtemburgs 

 sind Batrachier," and from that time dates the development of 

 our knowledge of these extinct forms as Amphibia. Three 

 years after Quenstedt's paper appeared, Vogt upheld the same 

 contention in his essay "Archegosaurus und all Labyrintho- 

 donten sind Amphibien nicht Reptilien." 



In 1850, after the discovery of the Archegosaurus and its 

 identification, Doctor Jaeger published an interesting essay en- 

 titled "Ueber die Uebereinstimmung des Pygopterus lucius Ag. 

 mit dem Archegosaurus dechenii Goldf." In this essay Jaeger 

 brings out the interesting facts of the early discovery of the 

 Archegosaurus. I give the following translation of the first 

 paragraph of Jaeger's essay: "In the collection of the late 

 Professor Storr, of Tubingen, which was received in 1817 at the 

 Imperial Museum of Natural History at Stuttgart, there was 

 found a skull enclosed in a spherosiderite nodule. This skull 

 was listed in 1777 as No. 192, in the printed catalogue of the 

 Pasquay collection (which was the foundation of the Storr col- 

 lection), without giving the locality, as a fish skull which had 

 been discovered in a non-fissile gray shale. Agassiz, at whose 

 disposal the entire collection of fossil fishes was soon after 

 placed, designated this specimen on a label in his own hand- 

 writing at first as Aspidorhynchus nov. sp. On a label written 



