On some reptilian remains
4. On some Reptilian remains; by Prof. Cope, (Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., xi, 117.)—The fossil which Prof. Cope exhibited was the almost perfect cranium of a Mosasauroid reptile, the Clidastes propython. He explained various peculiarities of its structure, as the moveable articulation of certain of the mandibular pieces on each other, the suspension of the os-quadratum at the extremity of a cylinder composed of the opisthotic, &c., and other peculiarities. He also explained, from specimens, the characters of a large new Plesiosauroid from Kansas, discovered by Wm. E. Webb, of Topeka, which possessed deeply biconcave vertebræ, and anchylosed neural arches, with the zygapophyses directed after the manner usual among vertebrates. The former was thus shown to belong to the true Sauropterygia, and not to the Streptosauria, of which Elasmosaurus was the type. Several distal caudals were anchylosed, without chevron bones, and of depressed form, while proximal caudals had anchylosed diapophyses and distinct chevron bones. The form was regarded as new, and called Polycotylus latipinnis, from the great relative stoutness of the paddle.
He also gave an account of the discovery, by Dr. Samuel Lockwood, of Keyport, of a fragment of a large Dinosaur, in the clay which underlies immediately the clay marls below the lower Green Sand bed in Monmouth county, N. J. The piece was the extremities of the tibia and fibula, with astragalo-calcaneum anchylosed 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 Symphypoda, near to Compsognathus Wagn. The extremity of the fibula was free from, and received into, a cavity of the astragalo-calcaneum, and demonstrates what the speaker had already asserted, that the fibula of Ignanodon 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.