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INTRODUCTORY. 
The Geological Cabinet of the University of Rochester, already very rich in fossil organic remains, 
has lately received a most valuable addition of a copy in plaster of the Megatherium Ciwieri — the 
huge extinct Ground-Sloth from the Pampas of Brazil. 
This unique specimen is the munificent gift of a prominent citizen of Rochester, TIiram Sibley, 
Esq., who, with enlightened liberality, furnished the funds expended in its purchase in London, its 
transfer to Rochester, and its permanent mounting in the largest of our Cabinet halls. 
The several parts of the skeleton have been well and carefully pnt together — a tedious and 
absorbing task, which occupied the writer and two experienced assistants for a period of nearly two 
months. 
The attitude given to the animal is of course hypothetical, but is intended to represent the manner 
in which, in all probability, it obtained its leafy food. It is in the act of wrenching from the trunk of 
a tree a low' branch which it has seized with its powerful fore-arm. The gigantic size of the fossil 
its long arms with great terminal claws, its massive hind legs, its colossal tail, and its feet a full 
yard in length, are sure to strike every beholder willi the profoundest wonder. One is tempted to 
doubt the reality of its former existence, and to think it some monstrous ideal fabric. Yet every bone 
in the entire skeleton is moulded over an actual specimen preserved in the cases of the British Museum 
and Royal College of Surgeons. Professor Owen, speaking of the same cast which was mounted 
at the British Museum under his direction, says, that it is “ so beautifully exact, as, for all the 
essential purposes of science, to be of the same value and utility as the bones themselves would be 
if so articulated together.” The wood cut which precedes the title page, gives a very correct view' 
of the case as it appears in the centre of the hall. An iron-railing which surrounds the cast, presents 
upon its upright posts bronze figures of ten representative forms among the Edentates — the natural 
order to which the fossil belongs. 
The object of the present memoir is to present in a concise form those facts in the history of the 
animal, its anatomical features, and its probable movements and habits, as are of the chiefest interest. 
Many of these facts are gathered from the memoir of Professor Owen upon the same fossil — one of 
the admirable series of monographs by which the great English naturalist has so extended the limits 
of knowledge in the departments of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. 
HENRY A. WARD. 
Rochester, July, 1864. 
