Dermal Bon es of tho Skull 



97 



Os cornu ein apophytaler Umhüllungsmantel hinzutrat, hat alles 

 andere zur Folge gehabt." The fundamental idea of this State- 

 ment pretty wellagreeswith Landois' opinion: ,,Bei den Cerviden 

 hat sowohl die Knochenhaut (Periost) des Schädeldaches 

 als auch die Lederhaut daselbst die Fähigkeit erlangt.. 

 Knochen zu erzeugen, welche sich als sekundäre Geweihstangen 

 ausgestalten können." 



Mr. Rhumbler agrees with Gadow and Wiedersheim up 

 to the point to homologize, by the bulk, the horns and antlers. 

 Nevertheless the views pronounced by these three authors with 

 respect to the identification, i.e. homologization, of the Single ele- 

 ments composing the armaments, are very different. Mr. 

 Rhumbler's statement pleads the rightnessof the views of authors 

 who, on the contrary to Mr. Gadow' s opinion, considered horns 

 and antlers as consisting of two genetically different ele- 

 ments, united bya phylogenetically later fusion. The elementdes- 

 cribed by Mr. Rhumbler as the cervid os cornu is mostprobably 

 retraceable to a purely corial ossification, bearing in anomalous, 

 i. e. at least actually anomalous, cases no intimate relations to 

 the osseous tissue constituting the frontal bone. It must be here 

 remarkedthat Mr. Rhumbler is decidedly mistaken pretending 

 that the ,, Rosenstock, der das Geweih trägt ist . . . ein epiphy taler 

 Hautknochen, ein Os cornu also again a wrong ex- 



pression, a wrong application of the term: pedicle. The figure 

 he refers to (op. cit. Fig. 5), clearly demonstrates that the ,, Rosen- 

 stock", i. e. thepedicle itself, is undoubtedly a frontal apophysis. 

 That is to say that the term pedicle can only be used for the 

 basal part bei ow the ,, rose" (designated by ,,M" onhis Figs.5 & 6), 

 Support ing, orinthe special cases representedby the mentioned 

 Figures (1 — 6) rather peripherically enclosing the os cornu. The 

 outer layers (,, Umhüllungsmantel") of the antlers represent, accor- 

 ding to Rhumbler, merely the continuation of the pedicle, i. e. 

 frontal apophyses, and would thus be retraceable to a strangely 

 specialized frontal exostosis, whilst the inner ,,axis" of the antlers 

 would consist of the epiphytic os cornu. Supposed this hypothesis 

 proves to be right, the whole of the antlers (,, Stange") could in 

 no wise be homologized with the cavicornian os cornu, as interpreted 

 by Wiedersheim. Mr. Rhumbler's latter statement, i. e. the 

 purely apophytic character of the ,,antlers-sheet", appears, to 

 my mind, somewhat improbable. This is, however, on my part, 

 merely an impression; maybe that I am mistaken, but I must con- 

 fess"not being able to depart that far from the supposition that the 

 antlers — their ,,sheet" included — are of a dermal origin. Their 



Op. cit. p. 94. 



'3) H. Landois, Eine dritte Edelhirsch- Geweihstange &c., Ai-ch. f. 

 Entw. mech., Bd. 14, 1908, p. 289 — 295, with 3 Textfigs. Quoted sentence 

 on p. 294 (fide Bhumbler, op. cit. p. 94). 

 Op. cit. p. 82. 



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