580 Fossil Remains of Anoplotherium 



to have been a giraffe. At that time the authors of the present 

 communication had not access either to drawings of the osteology 

 or to a skeleton of the existing giraffe : but the grounds for referring 

 the vertebra to that genus were, that it belonged to a ruminant with 

 a columnar neck, the type of the ruminants being preserved, though 

 very attenuated in its proportions : that the animal was very distinct 

 from any of the camel tribe : that it was in the giraffe that there 

 existed such a form most aberrant from the mean in respect of its 

 great elongation. That the bone belonged to a giraffe was put forth 

 at the time as only a probable inference, and chiefly to serve as an 

 index to future inquiries. 



The authors, having since the former period obtained additional 

 specimens, and had access to the fullest means of comparison, are 

 now able to place on the record of determined Sewalik fossils, one 

 very marked species of giraffe, and also indications of a second species, 

 which, so far as the scanty materials go, appears to come near to that 

 of Africa. 



The first specimen to which they refer is the identical vertebra 

 noticed by Capt. Cautley in 1838. It is an almost perfect cervical 

 vertebra. It were needless to enter on the characters which prove it 

 to have belonged to a ruminant. Its elongated form shows that it 

 belonged to one with a columnar neck ; that is to say, either to one 

 of the camel and Auchenia tribe, or to a giraffe, or some distinct and 

 unknown type. The fossil differs from the vertebra of a camel, 1st, 

 in the position of the vertebrary foramina (a, a!) ; 2d, in the obsolete 

 form of the upper transverse processes. According to the masterly 

 analysis of the Macrauchenia by Professor Owen, the Camelidse and 

 Macrauchenia differ from all other known mammalia in the following 

 peculiarity ; that the transverse processes of the six inferior cervical 

 vertebrae are without perforations for the vertebrary arteries, which 

 enter the vertebrary canal along with the spinal chord, then pene- 

 trate the superior vertebrary laminae, and emerge on the canal again 

 close under the anterior oblique processes. This structure appears 

 on the cervical vertebrae of the Sewalik fossil camel. In the verte- 

 bra now under consideration, on the contrary, the foramina (a, a!) 

 maintain their ordinary position, that is, they perforate the transverse 

 processes, and appear on the surface of the body of the vertebra. 



