586 SHUFELDT—OSTEOLOGY OF THE WOODPECKERS.  [Oct. 6, 
riorly the postero-external angle is obliquely truncated, and the 
head for the corresponding pterygoid is completely aborted, the 
palatine being simply drawn out at this end. About midway up its 
mesial border it develops a conspicuous interpalatine process, 
directed forward, while another free process, also directed forward, 
springs from that point on the bone where the bifurcation of the 
vomer articulates in a great number of ordinary birds. This last 
process, so variable and so conspicuous in nearly all /rcz, I here 
designate as the palatine spur. During ossification of the mesial 
and external margins of either prepalatine minute islets of bone are 
left, and these may persist or they may not persist during the life 
of the individual. 
The vomer, mesial in position, is situated rather far back be- 
tween the palatines, and is non-bifurcated posteriorly. It is pointed 
in front and pointed behind, and rests for nearly its entire length 
upon the nether aspect of the sphenoidal rostrum. In some Wood- 
peckers it is quite compressed in the vertical direction and of 
somewhat of a lozenge-shaped outline. That it is not forked pos- 
teriorly need not surprise us, for that also is the case with the semi- 
rudimentary vomer in Geococcyx and some other birds. 
The lower margin of the mid-lying nasal septum is long and 
scraggly ; while above, the laminated portion of the bone is not 
completed up to the premaxilline roof. A maxillo-palatine is of 
considerable size, broad, horizontally flattened, perforated upon its 
nether side by foramina, and finally it sends backward from its 
mesio-posterior angle a blunt-like process. This last feature is 
absent in many P%c7, and here in Co/aptes the inner margin of a 
maxillo-palatine barely comes in so far as the outer border of the 
corresponding palatine, and so these bones are widely separated 
from each other in the middle line. 
In Colaptes the mandible is of the typical V-shaped pattern, long 
and narrow, with a very shallow symphysis. Its ramal sides are 
rather shallow, upright and with rounded superior and inferior 
borders. A ramal vacuity is absent, or reduced to a mere pinhole 
or smaller. The angular extremities are rounded, and offer no 
special process on either side. This jawbone is pneumatic, and its 
hinder articular ends present the usual ornithic characters, with 
perhaps an arrangement of the mandibular facets peculiar to the 
Pici, but departing but littie from what we find in almost all ordi- 
nary avian types. In the adult all the sutural traces among the 
splint-bones composing the mandible have disappeared. 
