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II. On the Osteology of the genus Glyptodon.. By Thomas EL Huxley, F.B.S. 
Received December 30, 1863, — Read January 28, 1864, 
Part I. — -The history of the discovery and determination of the remains of the Eoplophoridce. 
Part II. — -A description of the skeleton of Glyptoclon davipes, Owen ( Hoplophorus Selloi, Lund?). 
§ 1. Description of the Skull. 
§ 2. Description of the Vertebral Column. 
Part I. — The history of the discovery and determination of the remains of the Hoplo- 
phoridae, or animals allied to. or identical with , Glyptodon clavipes. 
The earliest notice of the discovery of the remains of Glyptodon-Yike animals is con- 
tained in the following extract from a letter, addressed to M. Auguste St. Hilaire by 
Don Damasio Laranaga, Cure of Monte Video, which appears in a note at p. 191 of the 
fifth volume of the first edition of Cuvier’s ‘ Ossemens Fossiles,’ published in 1823: — 
“I do not write to you about my Dasypus (Megatherium, Cuv.), because I propose 
to make it the subject of a memoir which, I trust, may not be unworthy of the 'atten- 
tion of those European savants who take an interest in fossils. I will merely say that 
I have obtained a femur, which was found in the Rio del Sauce, a branch of the Saulis 
Grande. It weighs about seven pounds, and may be six or eight inches wide. In all 
points it resembles the femur of an Armadillo. I will send you one of its scales. The 
tail, as you have seen, is very short and very large ; it also possesses scutes, but they 
are not arranged in rings, or in whorls. These fossils are met with, almost at the sur- 
face, in alluvial, or diluvial, formations of a very recent date. It would seem that similar 
remains exist in analogous strata near Lake Merrim, on the frontier of the Portuguese 
colonies.” 
Cuvier expresses no opinion as to the accuracy, or otherwise, of Don Damasio 
Laranaga’s identification of his Dasypus with the Megatherium, an identification which, 
it will be seen, was erroneous. 
The volume of the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin for the 
year 1827 contains a memoir by Professor Weiss* upon the collections of fossils and 
minerals gathered in South America by Sellow, accompanied by five plates, four of 
which display excellent representations of various portions of the dorsal and caudal 
dermal armour, and of part of a femur, of one or more species of Glyptodon. Some of 
these fossils (the fragments of the dorsal dermal armour) were obtained at three feet 
from the surface, in the marly clay of which the banks of the Arapey Chico (a branch 
* Ueber das siidliche Ende des Gebirgzuges von Brasilien in der Provinz San Pedro do Sul und der Banda 
Oriental oder dem Staate von Monte Video : nach den Sammlungen des Herrn Fa. Sellow, von Herrn Weiss 
(Gelesen in der Akademie der Wissenschaften am 9. August 1827, und 5. Juni 1828). 
MDCCCLXV. G 
