Author: Henry Fairfield Osborn

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 9781230463667

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... ica," of 1879. In the meantime, however, he began to renew his notices of vertebrate remains of the Eastern States, especially from the phosphate beds of South Carolina, which he collected in his two memoirs of 1874 and 1879." In 1880 he describes the fauna of the bone cave in Pennsylvania and gives a second paper on Bathygnathus. Occasional contributions follow in succeeding years on the horses and peccaries, and in 1884 there begin his notices of the vertebrate fossils from Florida, which continued until 1889, when Leidy's last important contributions to vertebrate palaeontology were published in the Transactions of the Wagner Free Institute of Science.' By an interesting coincidence these animals, which were partly obtained by Leidy's intimate friend, Mr. Joseph Willcox, were closely related to those from the Loup Fork of Nebraska, which Leidy had begun to describe in 1856, forty years before. EVOLUTION. From the time of his first paper of 1847 on the fossil horse of America until his last paper of 1889, "On Hippotherium and Rhinoceros from Florida," Leidy was constantly accumulating facts for Darwin. It was a common saying that it is "a simple matter to construct the building after the materials are supplied." As a close observer of affinities of structure he anticipated by many years both Cope and Marsh in building up the materials for the phylogeny of the horses, camels, rhinoceroses, and other groups of ungulates. There does not seem to be a single case in which Leidy failed to recognize affinity. He showed extraordinary acuteness in distinguishing the various "Description of vertebrate remains chiefly from the phosphate beds of South Carolina. Journ. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia, vol. 8, 1877, pp. 209-261. Notice of a new and...