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Zoology. 127 
with one of Judge C.’s negroes, a servant came, with nineteen 
from Judge C., the original of which is now in my possession, _ 
~“ Dear Sir—Most fortunately and apropos, this: morning a negro 
fellow discovered twenty-five feet of a Basilosaurus, with the head, &e., 
in a line exposed upon the surface of the earth. From appearances, 
the balance can easily be obtained. I send a boy with a horse for you, 
supposing it best for you to return to the bones and commence epics 
tions here. The place is about half a mile from the house. - 
Yours respectfully, J..G, Creacu.” 
~ On the receipt of this I repaired to the spot, where I saw for the first 
time parts of a head and teeth of the Zeuglodon. The Judge had not 
suffered any of the vertebra to be disturbed, merely having caused a 
thin layer of earth to be removed, so as to expose twenty five feet of 
the animal. A negro that morning had discovered them with his plough, 
while ploughing, lying in a gentle slope of land, whose surface had 
en much carried away by the late rains. The field had been in cul- 
tivation during many years. Here we obtained the skeleton, which is 
now at Albany, of which I gave a short account in this Journal in the 
spring of 1843, and I now repeat what I then published, that it evidently 
and undoubtedly belonged to one individual animal ; excepting the ver- 
tebrx: of the neck, which were partly displaced, (but lay on a surface 
less than’ a rod square, and those that were displaced lay near the head 
or rather its fragments,) the vertebra were in an almost unbroken 
series to the extreme tail—most of them were connected and sometimes 
two or three would stick together when pryed out of their bed, their 
ends generally joined ; nor dol think there was more than once a ya- 
cancy of six inches. The vertebre increased i in size from the neck 
downward, attaining their maximum size in the lumbar region, at which 
point our skeleton attained a length of sixty feet or more, and we were 
much disappointed when it tapered off soon to the tail, at a length of 
nearly seventy feet. The general outline of the skeleton greatly re- 
sembles that of the Plesiosaurus, and this lead Judge Creagh and myself 
at the time in our discussions with regard to the nature of the animal, 
to say that Owen must be wrong in referring it to the Cetacea. 
_ These bones constitute by far the most perfect skeleton of the Zeu- 
glodon known, and they are now in possession of Prof. Emmons, at 
Albany, N.Y. ‘The vertebree are numbered in the order in which 
they were obtained.* The boxes in which the bones were brought from 
* Our skeleton has the anterior terminal portions of both jaws, with teeth, base 
of lower jaw, a perfect femur, a portion of a scapula, with the heads of the hu- 
merus, an entire. humerus, a distinct portion of a fore arm, radius and ulna, a por- 
tion ofa pelvis, with many fragments of ribs from one to three feet long, besides 
ertebre already named. 
