124 proceedings of the geological society. [dec. 19, 



December 19, 1855. 



The following Communications were read : — 



1. Description of a Fossil Cranium of the Musk-Buffalo 



[Bubalus moschatus, Owen ; Bos moschatus (Zimm. ^ Gmel.), 



Pallus ; Bos Pallasii, Be Kay ; Ovibos Pallasii, H. Smith ^ Bl.l 



from the "Lower-level Drift" at Maidenhead, Berkshire. 



By Professor Owen, F.R.S., F.G.S. &c. 



The subject of this description was discovered by the Rev. Mr, 

 Kingsley and John Lubbock, Esq., in a gravel-pit close to the engine- 

 house at the Maidenhead Railway Station : the deposit appears to be 

 that called " the lower-level drift." The specimen was submitted to 

 my inspection by Mr. Lubbock in July 1855, and proved to be the 

 first example of the Buffalo-tribe (Bubalus) which had come under 

 my observation from a British locality, and I most heartily wel- 

 comed so interesting an accession to the catalogue of British fossil 

 mammals. 



The specimen consisted of the cranial part of the skull, from which 

 one condyle of the occiput, and the tip of the left horn-core were 

 broken away ; but the characteristic very broad, depressed, approxi- 

 mated, rugged bases of the horns, covering the whole upper surface 

 of the cranium save a narrow median channel, and a portion of the 

 much extended telescopoid orbit at once showed the subgenus to 

 which the fossil belonged. 



The bovine ruminants present, as is well known, three main 

 modifications of their horns and horn-cores ; in one the horn is 

 subcylindrical at the base, which springs from the posterior angle 

 of the frontal ; in another the base of the horn, of similar shape, 

 springs from the frontal in advance of the post-posterior angle ; in a 

 third the base of the horn is more or less depressed and expanded in 

 breadth, so as to spring (in the adult males) from the whole or a 

 large proportion of the lateral part of the frontal, and in some to en- 

 croach upon its upper surface. To the bovine animals with the first 

 modification the generic name Bos has been restricted ; to those 

 with the second modification that of Bison is given, and the term 

 Bubalus is applied to the third*. The common appellations of 

 "Oxen," "Bisons," and "Buffaloes" answer to the Latin generic terms 

 above cited, and the Musk-buffalo seems to have been subgenerically 

 separated without due grounds from the other Bubali, and especially 

 from the Cape Buffalo {Bubalus ca^er), under the misguiding term 

 Ovibos; its peculiar affinities amongst the Ox-tribe to the Sheep 

 being by no means obvious : for the woolly covering beneath the 

 coarser hair of the Musk-buffalo is a purely adaptive modification 



* I do not here pledge myself to the soundness or strict uniformity with nature of 

 the threefold division of the Bovidce, above cited. Intermediate modifications have 

 been pointed out in Indian species of Wild oxen, under the terms Bidos and GavcBus, 

 by the acute observer Mr. B. H. Hodgson (Illustrations of the Genera of the 

 Bovinae, 8vo. 1841) ; but the three main modifications of the horns, at least as 

 regards their bases and origins, are those that it seems to me are chiefly of moment 

 in reference to the fossil skull in question. 



