30 FOSSIL REPTILIA OF THE LONDON CLAY. 



of Crocodilia in the Eocene clay forming the Isle of Sheppy, in the last volume of the 

 second edition of his great work on the ' Ossemens Fossiles,' p. 165, 1824. He there 

 specifies a third cervical vertebra, which was obtained by M. G. A. Deluc, at Sheppy, 

 and of which Cuvier made a drawing at Geneva ; he says it much resembles the 

 corresponding vertebra in one of our living Crocodiles, and might have come from an 

 individual about five feet in length. " M. Deluc," he adds, " found very near it a 

 much smaller vertebra, which I recognised as belonging to a monitor or some allied 

 genus."* 



Our knowledge of the Eocene Crocodiles of Sheppy received a remarkable accession 

 at the publication of the highly interesting and instructive ' Bridgewater Treatise' of 

 Dr. Buckland, in which he states that " true Crocodiles, with a short and broad snout, 

 like that of the Caiman and the Alligator, appear, for the first time, in strata of the 

 tertiary periods, in which the remains of mammalia abound. . . . One of these," he adds, 

 " found by Mr. Spencer in the London Clay of the Isle of Sheppy, is engraved PI. 25', 

 fig. 1," and the name ' Crocodilus Spenceri' is appended to that figure. 



In preparing my ' Report on British Fossil Reptiles' for the British Association in 

 1841, 1 examined the original specimen figured by Dr. Buckland, in which unfortunately 

 the end of the snout with the intermaxillaries and an indeterminate proportion of the 

 maxillaries having been broken off and lost, no exact idea could be formed of the pro- 

 portions of the facial or rostral part of the skull. 



In a larger specimen of the fossil skull of a Crocodile from Sheppy, in the British 

 Museum, T. II A, the whole of the upper, as well as the lower jaw, were preserved, and 

 as the proportions of the snout agreed with those of some true Crocodiles, and differed 

 in an equal degree with those species from the Gavial ; and as, like the Crocodiles and 

 Caimans, it presented the more important distinction of a different composition of that 

 part of the skull, I retained for the specimen in that ' Report' the name of Crocodilus 

 Spenceri, proposed by the author of the Bridgewater Treatise for the Sheppy Crocodile, 

 so differing from the Gavial. 



The able keeper of the Mineralogical Department of the British Museum, Charles 

 Konig, K.H., F.R.S., to whom I am indebted for every facility in describing and figuring 

 this specimen, has suggested that the name by which Baron Cuvier first indicated the 

 existence of a true Crocodile in the Eocene clay of Sheppy, should have the priority, 

 and I adopt, therefore, the name Crocodilus toliapicus, which he has attached to the 

 specimen in question, and with the more readiness since I have now reason to doubt 

 whether the mutilated cranium, figured in the ' Bridgewater Treatise,' belongs to the 

 same species. 



* Could this have been a vertebra of the large serpent, which I have subsequently described under the 

 name of Palceophis ? I have not as yet met with a single lacertian vertebra from Sheppy. If the collection 

 of M. Deluc be still preserved at Geneva, the vertebra in question might be compared with the figures of the 

 Palceophus toliapicus, "Ophidia,' T. XV. 



