OCT 4& 1898 
ARTICLE VII. 
(Plates XVII and XVIII.) 
THE OSTEOLOGY OF ELOTHERIUM. 
BY W. B. SCOTT. 
(INVESTIGATION MADE UNDER A GRANT FROM THE ELIZABETH THOMPSON FUND OF THE A. A. A. Ss.) 
Read before the American Philosophical Society, February 4, 1898. 
Elotherium is one of the many genera of fossil mammals concerning which the 
growth of our knowledge has been exceedingly slow, and only of late has it become prac- 
ticable to give a complete account of its bony structure. The genus was named in 1847 
by Pomel (47 a, 6) and shortly afterward renamed Entelodon by Aymard (’48) from a 
better specimen, but for several years only the dentition was known and that imperfectly. 
In 1850, Leidy (50, p. 90) described the first American species, but, not suspecting its 
generic identity with the European forms, he at first referred it to a new genus, Archio- 
therium. Leidy’s material enabled him to give a fairly complete account of the skull. 
Kowaleysky, in 1876, described an imperfect skull found in France and he further 
showed that the feet were didactyl, a very unexpected fact in view of the pig-lke char- 
acter of the dentition. In this country Profs. Marsh and Cope have added materially to 
our knowledge of this remarkable animal (Marsh, ’73, 793, 94; Cope, ’79) and the 
former has published a restoration of one of the species. In spite, however, of this list 
of workers who have, from time to time, occupied themselves with the study of Hlothe- 
rium, much still remains to be learned regarding its structure, and its phylogenetic rela- 
tionships are even more obscure. ; 
In the summer of 1894, Mr. H. F. Wells discovered in the White River Bad Lands 
of South Dakota certain bones, which, with the expenditure of infinite pains and skill, 
were excayated from the rock by Mr. J. B. Hatcher, and which proved to be a most 
remarkably complete skeleton of EHlotherium. This beautiful specimen (Princeton Mu- 
seum, No. 10885,) formed the subject of a preliminary communication which I made to 
the third International Zodlogical Congress, at Leyden (Scott, ’96), and will be more fully 
described in the following pages. Except for a single thoracic vertebra (and perhaps a 
