20 Mr. H. G. Seeley on the Structure of 



of the Society, jealous of its scientific reputation, I thought it 

 better than saying that " the British Museum has just pur- 

 chased from the Zoological Society the dead body of an animal 

 which was for some weeks living in their Gardens," which 

 would have been the truthful statement ; and it appears that 

 Dr. Sclater was himself ashamed of this statement; for he says 

 that it was " sent " to the British Museum, without saying that 

 it was sent for its specific name to be determined, and for pur- 

 chase. But all the animals which the Museum receives from 

 the Zoological Society (established for the cultivation and 

 extension of zoological science) are purchased ; and when the 

 Society was badly off for funds, this was a fair source of in- 

 come, of which I do not complain. 



III. — Additional Evidence of the Structure of the Head in 

 Ornithosaurs f'om the Cambridge Upper Greensand ; being 

 a Supplement to ' The OrnithosauriaJ' By Harry G. 

 Seeley, F.G.S., Assistant to Prof. Sedgwick in the Wood- 

 wardian Museum of the University of Cambridge *. 



[Plates n. & III.] 



To the anterior end of the snout and the back of the brain- 

 case belong nearly all the fragments of Pterodactylian skulls 

 hitherto collected from the Cainbridge Upper Greensand ; 

 and although the snouts are numerous, they never extend 

 backward beyond the denticulate part of the palate or to the 

 narial apertures ; while the back ])art of tlie head never reaches 

 so far forward as to include the frontal bones ; so that the 

 great middle region of the skull, the seat of the orbits and 

 nares, which transforms its characters Avith successive groups 

 in reptiles, mammals, and birds, remains unknown. And 

 before the general structure of the head can be illustrated by 

 detailed comparisons in this Cretaceous Ornithocheiroid family, 

 we must leani the condition and form of the bones called 

 frontal, nasal, lachrymal, maxillary, malar, vomer, palatine, 

 pterygoid, postfrontal, and the proximal end of the os qua- 

 dratum. And if one were a believer in the old morphological 

 doctrine that a like conforaiation of bone in extinct and living 

 animals warrants the presumption of their having had a like 

 grade of organization, it were hard, with these Ornithosaurian 

 snouts before us, and all the vertebrate province assembled, 

 for us to seek their similars from, to pronomice a sure judg- 



* Communicated by the Author, being the first part of a paper read 

 before the Cambridge Philosophical Society, May 30, 1870. 



