93 



The skulls in the Australian Museum of the Tasmanian killer vary 

 somewhat in themselves, and neither of them exhibit the differentiating 

 character of a more pointed- beak than that possessed by the Pseud, 

 crassidens, in so marked a manner as the figure in the Proc.-Zool. Soc, 

 London, of the skull in the Eoyal College of Surgeons. Indeed, one 

 of them, by the more rounded form of the terminal portion of the beak, 

 assumes in its cast of features a position intermediate between the 

 animals described by Messrs. Eeinhardt and Slower ; thus lessening, by 

 the gradual approach to cranial similitude, the slight specific distinctions 

 presented by the examination of two skulls only by the latter zoologist. 



Setting aside these trivial shades of facial disagreement, particularly 

 in a class of animals notorious for cranial variations, and taking into 

 consideration that in all the essential qualities of osseous structure, in 

 the size, ia the colour, and in the habits of the living animal, both so- 

 called species intimately agree, I am irresistibly led to the conclusion 

 that the northern and southern animals are identical, or at the most, 

 but varieties caused possibly by some lengthened period of isolation 

 from others of their kindred. 



" The Tasmanian killer, black grampus, or peaked-nose blackfish, is 

 usually met with in shoals ranging from fifty to one hundred each, and 

 always in company with the smaller kinds of the delphinidae and cow- 

 fish" : I presume, on the principle " wheresoever the carcass is, there 

 will the eagles be gathered together." " It is a peculiarly wary 

 cetacean, and I never heard of any having been captured, with the 

 exception of one fastened to at day-dawn in the North Pacific Ocean, 

 by an American whaler, supposed at the time to be an ordinary school 

 sperm whale." ' 



A good mounted skeleton of this animal in our Museum gives an 

 entire length of 16 feet, that of the sliull as somewhat exceeding 25 

 inches, and of the beak measured from a line drawn between the 

 maxiUary notches to the tip as llj inches. 



Genus Steeeodelphis,^ Gervais. 



Teeth rather large, with short, nearly hemispherical crowns. 

 Stereodelphis brevidens, Dubreuil et Gervais. 



The fossil remains of this, the only species, were found in the soft 

 tertiary sandstone at Herault, one of the departments of France. 



Genus PHOCiENA.' 



Teeth permanent, compressed, sharp-edged, rounded at their tips ; 

 head rounded, scarcely beaked, without any separating furrow ; muzzle 

 uniformly rounded to the extremity, where it gently curves upwards, 



^ The information respecting the habits of the Tasmanian Killer, contained in these 

 two quotations, was kindly supplied by my friend W. L. Crowther, M.D., M.L.O. of 

 Hobart Town. 



* ffrepf (is solid, and Se\(pls, dolphin. 



' ipdiKaiva, a porpoise. 



