Abstract
MR. LYDEKKER published in January 1885 the first part of the Catalogue of Fossil Mammals in the British Museum, and in it he recorded the specimens belonging to the Orders Primates, Chiroptera, Insectivora, Carnivora, and Rodentia. He has rapidly followed this up by the preparation of the second part, containing the sub-order Artiodactyla of the great Order Ungulata. The Natural History Department of the British Museum is remarkably rich in specimens of this sub-order, and though in the Catalogue, in the larger number of instances only the briefest possible description of each specimen is given, yet the volume has reached 324 octavo pages. The collections, in addition to those enumerated in the first part, which have furnished specimens, are the Bowerbank, Layton, Sloane, and Wigham collections. The author points out that he has employed generic terms in a wider sense than is the case with many writers. Thus he does notregard a difference of one or more premolar teeth, or in the number of digits, in allied forms, as a bar to generic unity, and accordingly he includes the genus Eurytherium in Anoplotherium. The Catalogue has been compiled with the care which distinguishes the catalogues of our great national Museum.
Catalogue of the Fossil Mammalia in the British Museum
Part II. Artiodactyla. By Richard Lydekker. (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1885.)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 33, 365 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/033365a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/033365a0