RELA TIONS AND HABITS OF MOSASA URS 45 



in the superfamily Varanoidea; perhaps an extreme view, but one 

 which more recent discoveries have, I believe, in large measure 

 substantiated. Gadow, very recently, has gone to the opposite 

 extreme in separating the mosasaurs into a distinct subclass 

 away from the subclass Squamata. Cope, notwithstanding his 

 wide acquaintance with living and fossil reptiles, urged that their 

 ophidian afifinities were stronger than their lacertilian ones. Baur 

 believed them to be only specialized and modified varanids ; 

 while Osborn has failed to see any marked varanid affinities in 

 them, even suggesting that they did not arise from the same 

 common stem. 



In 1892 Kramberger-Gorjanovic* described from the Lower 

 Cretaceous (probably Gault) of the island Lesina, near the Dal- 

 matian shores of the Adriatic, the remains of a remarkable lizard, 

 which he called Aigialosaurus. While his figures have recently 

 been shown to be incorrect in some details, and while some of 

 his minor interpretations were manifestly wrong, he correctly 

 assigned to his new genus and its allies an intermediate position 

 between the true Varanidae and the Mosasauridae, suggesting that 

 they had descended from the Varanidae and were ancestral to 

 the Mosasauria, while from them had been derived the dolicho- 

 saurs as a side branch. 



Aus unseren Betrachtungen aber folgt ganz unzweideutig, dass man die 

 erwahnten fossilen Gattungen weder der Familie Varanidae, noch direkt den 

 Pythonomorpha zutheilen kann. Sie sind einergemassen Collectivtypen, welche 

 an sich Merkmale zweier Unterordungen u. zw. der Lacertilia und Pythono- 

 morpha tragen, .... eine Uebergangsgruppe zwischen die Unterordnungen 

 Lacertilia und Pythonomorpha zu stellen ist. 



His conclusions regarding the relationships of the Mosa- 

 sauria are the more creditable from the fact that the only 

 information available to him at that time concerning them was 

 incomplete, and in part erroneous. Nevertheless, so apparent 

 were they that both Boulenger and DoUo accepted them, recog- 

 nizing in Aigialosaurus an ancestral type. 



More recently, Kornhuber^ has described and figured, in an 



^"Rad" der siidslavischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Kunst (Agram), 

 Voh CIX, pp. 96-123 ; Plate I, ff. I, 2 ; Plate II, ff. I, 2, 4. 



'^ Abhandlungen der k.-k. geologischen Reichs-Anstalt zu Wien, 1 90 1. 



