Fossil Reptilia of the Liassic Formations . Chapter III . Order ―

Inthe year 1858 a few fragmentary fossils of limb-bones were submitted to my inspection by James Harrison, Esq., of Charmouth, Dorsetshire, obtained from the upper part of the "lower Lias," near that place. They included portions of a femur and of a tibia, in which the texture of the wall and the size of the cavity of the shaft showed them to have been parts of a Saurian of more terrestrial habits than any of those whichhad been previously discovered in those liassic deposits : traces, moreover, of the extent and direction of certain processes, although broken away in the fossils, were discernible, which led me to suspect they belonged to a reptile allied to Iguanodon. Itherefore briefly notified the fact of a liassic Dinosaur in my 'Palæontology,'1 and indicated the animal by the generic name Scelidosaurus.2 The femur of the Iguanodon, as shown in vol i, p. 310, vol. ii, Pl. 20, is characterised by the deep and narrow fissure dividing a compressed external trochanter from the head of the bone, and by a process from the middle of the shaft, on the inner side, opposite to the part where the "third trochanter" projects in some of the large herbivorous mammals (Perissodactyla). Both these characters were repeated in the specimen of the shaft of the femur first submitted to me; but the shaft, viewed sideways, showed a more decided sigmoid flexure than in the Iguanodon, and the fissure between the great trochanter and the