364 
PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE MEGATHERIUM. 
he remarks, “ we might have inferred that the Megatherium also was covered with 
heavy armour, even had no such armour been discovered near bones of this animal in 
other parts of the same level district of Paraguay* * * § .” 
'Fhe estimable and justly celebrated author of the ^Bridgewater Treatise,’ notwith- 
standing his bias for the hypothesis of the affinities of the Megatherium to the Arma- 
dillos, enunciates his conclusion with philosophic caution, and affirms that the other 
“ remarkable character of the Megatherium, in which it approaches most nearly to 
the Armadillo and Chlamyphorus, consists in its hide having probably been covered 
with a bony coat of armour, varying from three-fourths of an inch to an inch and a 
half in thickness -f-.” In the same work is given an original figure of the pelvis and 
hind limb of the Megatherium, from a front view of those specimens in the Museum 
of the College of Surgeons. 
M. Laurillard, in the posthumous edition of the ‘ Ossemens Fossiles’ of Cuvier, 
published in 1836, whilst admitting it to be very possible for the Megatherium to 
have been covered by a cuirass, appends a note of warning against too hastily attri- 
buting to that animal the fragments of the gigantic osseous armour that had been 
found in the same formations of South America ; because, in the casts of some of the 
bones which were transmitted with that armour by Sir Woodbine Parish, M. Lau- 
rillard had recognized a calcaneum, an astragalus and a scaphoid, differing from 
those of the living Armadillos only by their size and by some merely specific modifi- 
cations 
But that which Baron Cuvier and M. Laurillard had ventured to regard as 
very possible, and Dr. Buckland as probable, M. de Blainville a few years later 
announced to be a positive fact. He communicated, in 1839, to the Academy of 
Sciences of the French Institute, a statement that bones of the Megatherium had 
recently been discovered, accompanied with fragments of a carapace belonging in- 
dubitably to the same animal ; and he adds that the association of a bony armour 
with the internal skeleton of the Megatherium can be demonstrated as surely by 
a priori reasoning as by the a posteriori fact ; but he adduces no observations or 
arguments from the skeleton in addition to those of which Dr. Buckland had pre- 
viously availed himself, simply affirming that “ the Megatherium is proved to have 
been certainly covered by an osteo-dermal carapace, by the disposition of the spinous 
processes of the vertebrae, by the angles of the ribs, by the articulation of the pelvis 
with the vertebral column,” &c. ; and he concludes by announcing ‘‘that the Mega- 
therium was a gigantic species of Armadillo, most nearly allied to the diminutive 
Chlamypliorus 
* Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, vol. i. pp. 160 and 161. 
I Ibid. p. 159. 
X Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, 8vo, 1836, tom. viii. p. 354. 
§ “ Recherches sur I’anciennete des Edentes terrestres h la surface de la terre,” Comptes Rendus de I’Acad. 
des Sciences, 1839, p. 65. 
