FOSSIL VARANIDAE AND MEGALANIDAE. 
463 
CHAPTER III. BIOLOGICAL, PHYLOGENETICAL AND 
SYSTEMATICAL NOTES. 
This large pleurodont Lizard was doubtless carnivorous, as believed 
at the beginning by Sir E. Owen, who in his first publication on the sub¬ 
ject emitted such supposition without having known any fragment of the 
jaw; since, as stated above, this «Cuvierian anticipation» (de Vis, p. 97) 
of the great British zoologist was proved to be a fact. Concerning the 
mode of life no special data exist ; the general habit of the skeleton makes 
it most probable that this Saurian was terrestrial. 
I should like to draw attention at this place to a highly interesting 
phenomenon which seems to be of a considerable bionomie importance. 
A few months ago Baron Nopcsa threw in a very ingenious manner some 
light on the physiologic reason of the Gigantism in some 13 i n o- 
saurs he. demonstrated that the fossa hypophyseos is in the skull 
of these huge Beptiles a very large one, so that the pituary gland (hypo¬ 
physis cerebri) was, in comparison to the brain, enormously developed. 
Eeferring to the pathological literature he proves that the hyperfunction 
and disproportionate development of the pituary gland — involved by an 
Adenome — produces Acromegaly, viz. a hypertrophic development in 
size. Thus Gigantism being bionomically explained, it is very natural 
that animals provided with pathogene characters, these becoming 
hereditary, the owners of them prove, sooner or later, unfit for life, these 
forms desappearing thereby from the World. This is, at the same time, 
the most natural explanation why the Dinosaurs were extinct, as 
a want of sufficient food or other like hypotheses, searching for an ex¬ 
planation concerning extinction of these huge forms, proved to be rather 
untenable, whilst the slight resistance and the decrease 
in sexual functions 1 2 are general phenomena accompaning Gi¬ 
gantisme, and furnish reason enough for the dying out of the forms attained 
by them. I thoroughly share in Baron Nopcsa ’s ingenious opinion pro¬ 
nounced by him regarding the Dinosaurians, and see in Mega - 
lania a further proof of its justness. In the preceeding chapter I pointed 
out the enormous size of the cavity containing the pituary organ in Mega- 
lania, about which we can state the same as Nopcsa observed in the Dino- 
sauria, namely that «mit der Zunahme der Körpergröße eine 
Zunahme der Hypophyse ihrem Hirn gegenüber 
1 Die Riesenformen unter d. Dinosauriern, Centralbl. f. Miner. Geol. u. 
Pal., JahTg. 1917, p. 332—348. 
2 Nopcsa, op. cit. p. 345. 
