THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 



NEW SERIES. DECADE V. VOL. II. 



No. VII — JULY, 1905. 



OI2,IC3-IIsrJLXi J^^ISTICLIES. 



I. — Notes on British Dinosaurs. Part III : Stbeptospondylus. 



By Dr. Francis Baron Nopcsa. 



(PLATE XV.) 



AFTER having studied a bipedal and a quadrupedal Orthopodous 

 Dinosaur I tbouglit it desirable to turn my attention, to 

 a bipedal representative of the Sauriscbian order.^ 



Tbough Streptospondylus is by no means an exclusively British 

 Dinosaur, since the type-specimen is preserved in the Jardin des 

 Plantes in Paris, and was described under the names Strepto- 

 spondylus and Megalosaurus by Cuvier and Gaudry, still, the only 

 other specimen known, and by far the best, is in Mr. J. Parker's 

 private collection at Oxford. It is to Mr. Parker's kindness that 

 I owe the possibility of studying and drawing what may be called 

 one of the most complete Theropods ever found, while in the Paris 

 Collection Streptospondyliis is only represented by several vertebrse, 

 a fragment of the femur, and the distal part of the tibia with the 

 corresponding astragalus. Mr. Parker's specimen includes the skull, 

 most of the cervical, dorsal, sacral, and some of the caudal vertebree, 

 the scapulo-coracoid, parts of both humeri, the ilium, ischium, parts 

 of the pubis, both femora, tibias, and fibulse, some tarsal and all the 

 metatarsal bones, and several phalanges. 



^ The quite exceptional economic role of Dinosaurs during the greater part of the 

 Mesozoic era justifies, I believe, the quite exceptional term ' subclass Dinosauria.' 

 The term OpisthocoBlia, as recently and persistently used by some American authors, is 

 decidedly a misnomer, for besides being absolutely misleading — since opisthocoelian 

 vertebrae occui' among Sauropoda, Theropoda, and Orthopoda — it was originally not 

 even used for a defined group of Dinosaurs, but for what might be called a potpourri 

 of Dinosaurian and Crocodilian reptiles. If one wants to emphasize the fact that 

 Theropoda and Sauropoda form a unit in consequence of theii' shovsdng greater 

 affinities to each other than to the Orthopoda, cf . Hulke's paper on Dystroj^hceus 

 the term Saurischia, as clearly defined by Professor Seeley, is applicable to 

 these reptiles. I desire to protest most energetically against the use of the term 

 ' Opisthoc(Elia.' 



DECADE V. VOL. II. — NO. Til. 19 



