QUATERNARY FAUNA OF GIBRALTAR. 77 
Since then, however, we have been furnished with abundant materials for the clearing 
up of what was to him necessarily obscure, and no difficulty now exists in distinguishing 
between the three existing species of Hyena from their cranial and dental characters 
alone; and I may remark that any difficulty even at that time would have been removed, 
had Dr. Falconer been acquainted with Dr. Wagner’s excellent paper “on the Specific 
Differences by which H. brunnea is distinguished from H. striata and crocuta, as 
manifested in the skull and dentition”. In this memoir, with which I was wholly 
unacquainted at the time when I communicated my paper to the Linnean Society, 
nearly all that I have remarked was anticipated more than twenty-three years ago. 
The principal cranial and dental characters by which the three existing species of 
Hyena are distinguished may be briefly stated as under? :— 
H. striata and H. brunnea, so far as regards cranial and dental characters, agree in 
so many particulars, as upon superficial inspection to be readily confounded. The 
chief points in which they agree are also those in which they both differ from H. crocuta 
and its fossil congeners. 
1. In both species the upper tubercular molar is triradicular and tricuspid, and rarely 
less than 0-5 in length by 0-2 in its shortest diameter; while in H. crocuta and its 
allies this tooth is normally biradicular and bicuspid, though not unfrequently by 
abortion or fusion uniradicular or entirely absent, and it is never more than 0-2 or 
0”:21 in length by about 0:1 in the shorter diameter, 
2, In having the three lobes of the upper carnassial tooth (pm. 4) subequal in the 
antero-posterior direction. 
3. In having a more or less distinct accessory point on the inner side of the hinder 
cusp of the lower carnassial(m. 1). It is true that a minute tubercle (or rudiment, 
rather, of a similar point) is not unfrequently seen in nearly the same situation in 
H.crocuta, and perhaps still more frequently in H. spelea*; but in those species it 
never assumes any thing like the size it presents in HZ. striata and H. brunnea, though 
it is considerably less in the latter species than in the former. Some difference also may 
be noticed in the exact situation of the accessory point in H. crocuta and spelea, in both 
which species it is usually situated as it were in a hollow beneath the base, at the inner 
and hinder border of the posterior cusp, whilst in H. striata and brunnec it rises distinctly 
on the inner surface of the cusp. 
Other points of agreement between these two species may be noticed, as, for 
instance, the presence in both of a distinct anterior talon to the second premolar, and of a 
* « Auseinandersetzung der specifischen Differenzen durch welche sich die H. brunnea von der H. striata 
und crocuta in der Beschaffenheit des Schiidels und Gebisses unterscheidet, yom Prof. Dr. A. Wagner,” Miinch, 
Abhandl. iii. p. 609, 1843. 
? Linn. Soc. Journal, ix. p. 65. 
* In twelve lower carnassials of H. spelea, from Kent’s Cavern and Kirkdale, in the national collection, a 
small accessory point was noticed in five, whilst in seven there was merely a trace of one. 
VOL. X.—PART I. No. 4.—August 1st, 1877. M 
