Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/407

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1869.] HUXLEY-NEW LABYRINTHODONT. 309


land we also meet with the true T. diphyoides in rocks of Cretaceous age; a description and figures of it will be found in W. A. Ooster's 'Synopsis des Brachiopodes des Alpes Suisses,' p. 19, p1. v. figs. 1-4, 1863. I have seen the specimen of T. viator, which M. Coquand assures me he found in Africa in rocks of Jurassic age(?), and likewise others obtained by MM. de Verneuil and Favre in Spain. The Diphyiod shells were at one time considered to be rare fossils; but within the last few years they have been discovered in many localities, although never hitherto in Great Britain.

Discussion.

Mr. J. W. Judd thought that the break usually existing between the Neocomian and Jurassic beds indicated a long interval of time, and that certain deposits in the Carpathians and elsewhere had been rightly referred to this intermediate period. Possibly, therefore, the Diphyoid Terebratuloe, commencing in the Jurassic, lived on through the Tithonian into the Neocomian period.

5. On a new Labyrinthodont from Bradford. By T. H. Huxley, LL.D. F.R.S., President of the Geological Society.

(Plate XI.)

The specimen which Mr. Miall has been so good as to send for my examination is without doubt a Labyrinthodont Amphibian. This is proved by the character of the vertebrae, of the ribs, and of the ventral armour. But the state of the fossil is such that it is not easy to discover points in which it can be strictly compared with those forms of Labyrinthodonts which are already known.

For example, nothing remains of the skull but some fragments of the upper and lower jaws. The piece of bone which represents the right upper jaw is 7 inches long, and has, like a fragment of the left upper jaw which lies below it, a pitted sculpture. A part of the right ramus of the mandible, with its symphysial end entire, is about 6 inches long, and about half an inch deep at the symphysis. Both upper and lower jaws bear close-set, even-sized teeth, nearly circular in section and somewhat recurved at their apices, which are rather obtusely pointed. Parallel longitudinal folds are indicated upon the basal halves of some of these teeth, the largest of which is not more than 0.5 in. long, by 0.15 in. thick at the base (P1. XI. fig. 1). An impression of a conical acutely pointed tooth, much larger than any of these (seeing that it must have had a length of nearly an inch when it was entire), is seen upon the matrix, 2 inches below the ramus of the mandible.

These features of the fossil prove sufficiently that it is not Anthracosaurus, but leave open the question of its identity with other Coal-measure Labyrinthodonts, and especially with Pholidogaster, the only fragments of the teeth which are preserved, in the latter genus, being not unlike those of the present specimen.

Impressions of some four or five and twenty vertebrae are dis-