Mr. Owen on the Glyptodon clavipes. 85 



de lui attribuer les grands fragmens qu'on a trouves, car les platres envoyes de 

 Londres demontrent qu'un Tatou de taille gigantesque existe, avec le Megathe- 

 rium, dans les plaines de Buenos Ayres. Ces morceaux caracteristiques consistent 

 dans un calcaneum, un astragale et un scaphoid qui ne s'eloignent de ceux des 

 Tatous vivans que par la grandeur et par des differences purement specifiques *." 

 Mr. Pentland at the same time assured Sir Woodbine Parish, in a letter of the 

 date of December 1835, that the bones which were found associated with the 

 armour at Villanueva did not belong to the Megatherium, but to a gigantic Arma- 

 dillo ; this opinion he arrived at by comparing the tarsal bones above-mentioned 

 with those of the Dasypus gigas. 



There is no question but that the correspondency, above indicated by MM. 

 Laurillard and Pentland, in the structure of three of the most characteristic of the 

 tarsal bones, sufficiently indicates the general affinity of the extinct animal possess- 

 ing them to the Armadillo family ; but I shall hereafter show that the modifications 

 of the other bones of the foot are such as to indicate something more than a 

 specific distinction. Besides, it was evident both to Mr. Clift and myself, at the 

 time when we first examined the fragment of the jaw accompanying these bones, 

 that the conformation of the alveoli in that fragment indicated a dentition differing 

 more widely from that of the existing sub-genera of Armadillos than their respective 

 dental characters differ from one another ; we, therefore, hesitated in assigning 

 these fossils to the genus Dasypus, hoping soon to obtain further information as to 

 the dental character of the species to which they belonged. 



It was at this conjuncture, that Sir Woodbine Parish received the intelligence 

 of the discovery of an entire skeleton, covered with its tesselated coat of mail, 

 about five feet below the surface, in the bank of a rivulet near the Rio Matanza, 

 about twenty miles south of the city of Buenos Ayres ; and with the account of 

 this remarkable discovery there was, at the same time, transmitted a drawing or 

 sketch of the whole animal, which has since been lithographed, and one of the teeth 

 of the fossil itself (PI. X. fig. 1 and 2) . This tooth Sir Woodbine Parish obligingly 

 submitted to my examination : its general structure proved it to belong to an animal 

 referrible to the Edentata of Cuvier ; but its form was so peculiar, that I had no 

 hesitation in pronouncing it to differ from that of any known edentate animal, 

 recent or fossil, and, from its intimate texture, to be indicative of a new sub- 

 genus of the Armadillo family, for which I proposed the name of Glyptodon, in 

 reference to the fluted or sculptured character of the tooth. A brief description 

 of the tooth, with the account of the discoveries of the skeleton, were immediately 

 printed, and have been published in Sir Woodbine Parish's work on Buenos 

 Ayresf. Subsequently, the recollection of the fragment of the jaw, with its pecu- 



* Loe. cit. torn. viii. p. 368. 



f P. 178 b. Frontispiece, Svo, 1838. Since the reading of the present paper, the discovery of bones 



