Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/111

1869.] features were the great number and elongation of the vertebræ of the neck, and the very light construction of the arches and other bones of the head.

"He thought the Penguin, with its separated metatarsals, formed an approach on the side of the birds; but whether the closest approximation to the Symphypoda should be looked for here or among the long-tailed Ratitæ (Ostrich, &c,) he was unable to indicate."

The 'Proceedings of the Boston Natural History Society' for June 18th, 1869, state that Prof. Cope "gave an account of the discovery by Dr. Samuel Lockwood, of Keyport, of a fragment of a large Dinosaur, in the clay which immediately underlies the clay-marls below the Lower Greensand bed in Monmouth County, New Jersey. The fossil represented the extremities of the tibia and fibula, with astragalo-calcaneum ankylosed to the former, in length about sixteen inches, distal width fourteen. The confluence of the first series of tarsal bones with each other and with the tibia he regarded as a most interesting peculiarity, and one only met with elsewhere in the reptile Compsognathus and in birds. He therefore referred the animal to the order Symphopoda, near to Compsognathus, Wagner. The extremity of the fibula was free from, and received into a cavity of the astragalo-calcaneum, and demonstrated what the speaker had already asserted, that the fibula of Iguanodon and Hadrosaurus had been inverted by their describers. The medullary cavity was filled with open cancellous tissue. The species, which was one half larger than the type-specimen of Hadrosaurus Foulkii, he named Ornithotarsus immanis."

It is very satisfactory to me to find that so able an anatomist as Prof. Cope should have been led by the force of facts to arrive, simultaneously with myself, at conclusions so similar in their general character with my own. It will be observed, however, that we differ a good deal in details. For example, it appeared to me that it was more probable that the so-called "clavicles" of the Dinosauria were ischia, rather than pubes; and in my diagrammatic restoration of Iguanodon, they are directed backwards in a manner approaching that in which the ischia of Birds are disposed, rather than in Crocodilian fashion, forwards, as Prof. Cope supposes. Prof. Cope does not allude to the strongly ornithic characters of the ilium and of the proximal ends of the tibia and fibula. In describing the astragalus of Lælaps, Prof. Cope states that "one other example only of this structure is known in the Vertebrata," referring to Cuvier's Honfleur reptile; but, as I shall show immediately, the astragalus is altogether similar in the commonest Birds, and probably in the whole class Aves.

Prof. Cope states that the fibulæ of the Dinosauria have been turned upside down by the describers of Iguanodon and Hadrosaurus. I am quite aware that the fibulæ of the former reptile have been figured the right way up by the artist and carefully inverted in the text by the describer; but if Prof. Cope will refer to my lecture, published in the 'Popular Science Review,' he will see that