114 STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS 



altered, and not impossibly the rim of each plate in this case is a 

 fusion of the ring of platelets of others. 



In Elliot's monograph of the Felidce I met with a very curious 

 assimilation between the disposition of plates on the forehead 

 shield of an Armadillo, and the disposition of the coloration on the 

 forehead of a domestic Cat. The latter forcibly recalls the former. 

 Both are shown in the accompanying Fig. 65. 



I have seen this forehead mark in other domestic Cats. Those 

 specks which we see on the Jaguar skin, enclosed within the ring of 



a. 



Fig. 65. — [a] Mark on the forehead of a domestic Cat (Elliot's Felida) ; the centre is 

 brown, edged with blaclc, and surrounded by a light ground ; [b) forehead shield of an 

 Armadillo, shown under the paw of F. Yaguarundi (Elliot's Felida). 



spotlets, such as those of Nos. 26 to , 28, Fig. 59, may just be the 

 modified imprints of the little knobs we see on the hexagonal 

 plates of Tolypeutes, a kind of Armadillo (Fig. 66 {d) ). But recently 

 Mr. Lydekker has possibly imparted to these inner specks a special 

 interest. In No. loi, new series, of Knoivledge, March 1894, Mr. 

 Lydekker has described the club-tailed Glyptodont of Argentina. 

 Each plate of this animal's carapace has several holes in it, which 

 the writer supposes gave passage to spines. Whatever they may 

 have given passage to, it strikes me very forcibly that the specks 

 in the interior of the Jaguar rosettes,'^ or imprints, as I would call 

 them, of ancestral carapacial plates, may possibly be the imprints 



' I have seen rosettes on a Jaguar (Tring Museum) with as many as six specks. 



