ANOMALOUS REPTILES 
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which lays eggs like a reptile. These two creatures belong to 
the Monotreme order. 
Now the Anomodont reptiles are divided into several groups, 
sub-orders, and families, of which we will take first those known 
as Dicynodonts/ because they illustrate the anomalous nature of 
the teeth, to which we referred just now. 
Sir E. Owen, after a careful study of these interesting remains 
concluded ^ that there had formerly existed in South Africa — 
probably in a great lake or inland sea — a race of reptiles pre- 
senting, in the construction of their skulls, characters presented 
by the crocodile, the tortoise, and the lizard, but possessing a 
pair of long tusks implanted in distinct sockets, like those of 
the walrus. No other kind of teeth had they; and, as in the 
case of a tortoise, the lower jaw appears to have been armed by 
a trenchant sheath of horny matter. The tusks are of a finer 
texture than that of the crocodile’s teeth, and almost as dense 
as in the hysena (see Plate X.). These illustrations are taken 
from photographs very kindly sent by Professor Amalitzky, of 
Warsaw, who has of late years laboriously worked out nodules 
containing bones, skulls, etc., from Permian strata on the banks of 
the Northern Dwina, near Archangel ; the results of his researches 
are of great value (see Sir E. Eay Lankester’s Extinct Animals, 
p. 212). The head is shown in Fig. 26, and the fore limb in 
Pigs. 27, 28. As it is, at present, hardly possible to restore the 
skeleton with any degree of certainty, we have not ventured to 
show the Dicynodon in our Plate of New Eed Sandstone Eeptiles 
(see Plate IX.). A carnivorous genus is shown in Plate XI. 
^ The genus Dicynodon is so called from two Greek words : dis, twice ; 
and hunodos, dog-toothed, on account of the two tusk-like canine teeth in 
the upper jaw. 
2 Professor Owen’s Memoir on the Dicynodon, Oeol. Trans., second series, 
vol. vi., with plates. 
