Zoology. 
III. Zoology. 
1. On the Zeuglodon Remains of Alabama; by S. B.* Buckley. 
(Communicated.)—Since it has been conclusively proved that the bones 
of the Zeuglodon, which Mr. Koch exhibited in New York and else- 
where, under the name of Hydrarchos, belonged to different individu- 
als, some may be disposed to doubt that the skeleton of the Zeuglodon, 
which I obtained in Alabama, now in possession of Prof. Emmons, at 
Albany, N. Y., is of one individual animal. On this point I would make 
the following statements. Scientific Intelligence. 
Through the assistance of Judge Creagh, of Clark Co., Alabama, at 
a locality nearly three miles from his house, (I think southeast) I ob- 
tained a vertebral column fifty feet in length, commencing near the tail 
and extending towards the head. Judge Creagh had commenced dig- 
ging at the same place about three years before and found some twenty 
or twenty-five feet in length of the vertebral column. These vertebra: 
at the locality extended in a line in their natural order, but owing to 
their exposed situation the processes were mostly broken off. After 
considerable search we struck the remaining portion of the vertebra:, 
at a depth of about two feet, and traced them to a depth of six feet, 
extending into a side hill. Up to this point the vertebree lay in close 
connection, joining end to end, but here their connection was broken 
off, and owing to the difficulty of digging we ceased work, despairing 
of obtaining the remainder, which could probably have been secured at 
the expense of much time and labor. The tail of this individual lay 
imbedded in a rich bottom composed of black vegetable mould, and its 
head, without doubt, lay beneath the adjoining hill. The black soil was 
about eighteen inches deep ; beneath this was a yellowish white marl 
to the depth of six feet, below which was a hard green sand marl in 
which the last bones we obtained at this locality were imbedded. These 
bones were numbered, and left in Judge Creagh’s door-yard at his re- 
quest, for the state collection of Alabama; as to their fate since, I have 
not been informed. 
After a few months I returned to Judge Creagh’s in 1842, who in- 
formed me that a few years before, he had got a few bones to send to 
Harlan, at Philadelphia, at a locality about three miles distant, and not 
far from the place where we obtained those already mentioned. We 
went there chiefly to obtain a head or parts of one ; and at a depth 
of from one to three feet, we dug out a vertebral column commencing 
near the lumbar region and extending towards the head, measuring 
twenty six feet in length. The vertebra: were often displaced, some- 
times one, two and three feet intervening between them, among which 
were scattered ribs which were in situ, and were generally broken in 
the middle, the two opposite ends approaching each other. By carefully 
removing the earth from the upper surface of several of these, we found 
their length from measurement taken on the spot, to be from four to six 
feet. At the time we were digging, the ground was very wet from re- 
cent rains, and the ribs were so brittle that we succeeded in getting only 
a few fragments, not more than two or three of which are now with 
the skeleton at Albany. The vertebrm at this locality were large and 
in an excellent state of preservation, better than those I found at any 
other locality, and I now regret that I did not bring any of them away, 
since they were all left on the ground. While I was engaged here Zoology. 
with one of Judge C.’s negroes, a servant came with the following letter 
from Judge C., the original of which is now in my possession. 
“ Dear Sir—Most fortunately and apropos, this morning a negro 
fellow discovered twenty-five feet of a Basilosaurus, with the head,&c., 
in a line exposed upon the surface of the earth. From appearances, 
the balance can easily be obtained. I send a boy with a horse for you, . 
supposing it best for you to return to the bones and commence opera- 
tions here. The place is about half a mile from the house. 
Yours respectfully, J. G. Creagh.” 
On the receipt of this I repaired to the spot, where I saw for the first 
time parts of a head and teeth of the Zeuglodon. The Judge had not 
suffered any of the vertebrae to be disturbed, merely having caused a 
thin layer of earth to be removed, so as to expose twenty five feet of 
the animal. A negro that morning had discovered them with his plough, 
while ploughing, lying in a gentle slope of land, whose surface had 
been much carried away by the late rains. The field had been in cul- 
tivation during many years. Here we obtained the skeleton, which is 
now at Albany, of which I gave a short account in this Journal in the 
spring of 1843, and I now repeat what I then published, that it evidently 
and undoubtedly belonged to one individual animal ; excepting the ver- 
tebra of the neck, which were partly displaced, (but lay on a surface 
less than a rod square, and those that were displaced lay near the head 
or rather its fragments,) the vertebrae were in an almost unbroken 
series to the extreme tail—most of them were connected and sometimes 
two or three would stick together when pryed out of their bed, their 
ends generally joined ; nor do I think there was more than once a va- 
cancy of six inches. The vertebrae increased in size from the neck 
downward, attaining their maximum size in the lumbar region, at which 
point our skeleton attained a length of sixty feet or more, an'd we were 
much disappointed when it tapered off soon to the tail, at a length of 
nearly seventy feet. The general outline of the skeleton greatly re- 
sembles that of the Plesiosaurus, and this lead Judge Creagh and myself 
at the time in our discussions with regard to the nature of the animal, 
to say that Owen must be wrong in referring it to the Cetacea. 
These bones constitute by far the most perfect skeleton of the Zeu- 
glodon known, and they are now in possession of Prof. Emmons, at 
Albany, N. Y. The vertebrae are numbered in the order in which 
they were obtained.* The boxes in which the bones were brought from 
* Our skeleton has the anterior terminal portions of both jaws, with teeth, base 
of lower jaw, a perfect femur, a portion of a scapula, with the heads of the hu- 
merus, an entire humerus, a distinct portion of a fore arm, radius and ulna, a por- 
tion of a pelvis, with many fragments of ribs from one to three feet long, besides 
the vertebras already named. 128 
Scientific Intelligence. 
Alabama contained a few portions belonging to other individuals, among 
which are one or two vertebrce which were not numbered, and which 
were never intended to be palmed off as belonging to the skeleton. 
Also a few fragments of ribs already mentioned, and the tibia (?) figured 
by Prof. Emmons, and described in the American Quarterly Journal of 
Agriculture and Science, vol. iii, p. 227. This specimen belongs to the 
first individual described in this note. However, no one would sup- 
pose but that it belonged to the skeleton at Albany, since the vertebral 
columns of the two individuals were nearly of the same size. The base 
of the lower jaw, plate 1, fig. 1., described by Dr. Emmons, p. 228 of the 
same volume, was obtained near the summit of the hard grey limestone 
bluff, about a mile from Suggsville, Clark Co., and about twenty-five miles 
distant from the Creagh plantation. This bone was imbedded upon the 
upper surface of the rock, and the outer surface of the bone was ex- 
posed and showed the yoked teeth with their large serratures in great 
perfection. It was upwards of three feet long. Owing to the hardness 
of the rock and brittleness of the bone, the specimen was often broken 
before detaching it with a large portion of rock, at the close of a toil- 
some day’s work. I obtained this specimen through the kindness of 
Dr. Denny, of Suggsville, who informed me of its existence. It is 
proper to add that the skeleton at Albany has its own portions of the 
lower jaw, so that Prof. Emmons knew that it belonged to a different 
individual, and has merely described it as an interesting bone of the 
collection. 
I should have stated that before going to Suggsville I visited anoth- 
er locality about a mile from Clarksville, on the road towards Macon, 
in Clark Co. This skeleton was in a sandy loam, and the bones were 
in a bad state of preservation, doubtless caused by the predominance 
of sand and deficiency of lime in the soil. I only staid there part of a 
day, having met with several thin plates of bone belonging to the jaws, 
several cervical vertebra? and fragments of ribs. The vertebra? and 
ribs were larger than those of the skeleton at Albany, and were all left 
on the spot excepting two fragments of ribs eight or ten inches long, 
which are with the skeleton at Albany. My object in visiting this local- 
ity was to obtain something approximating to a perfect head, and as 
soon as I saw it could not be done, the locality was abandoned. I be- 
lieve that a larger vertebral column than any yet obtained is still there. 
I saw a single vertebra of the zeuglodon, in possession of Mr. Cooper, 
a lawyer at Claiborne, which was eighteen inches long, and twelve 
inches in diameter at the ends. 
From what I have written it will be seen that the bones which I have 
enumerated as not belonging to the individual skeleton in Albany, add 
not to its size, nor were they ever intended by me to be considered as Zoology. 
129 
part of that skeleton ; but only more fully to illustrate the nature of the re- 
markable animal to which they belonged. I will add, that Judge Creagh 
informed me that the bones which he sent to Harlan, were found in 
different and distant places on his plantation, but described by Harlan as 
from one locality and belonging to one individual. The fragments of a 
jaw-bone, containing teeth much broken, were found about three-fourths 
of a mile from the house. This was the specimen which Harlan took 
to London, and from which Owen named the animal. 
Judge Creagh was among the first settlers of Alabama, and he often 
told me of the large number of bones which were on his and the ad- 
joining plantations, when he first moved there, how they interfered with 
the tillage of the soil, and how vast numbers of them had been burned 
and otherwise destroyed; and he added that an old hunter who lived 
among the Indians prior to the settlement of that country by the whites, 
had often told him that he had seen several entire skeletons of this ani- 
mal, lying upon the surface of the ground, upwards of a hundred feet 
in length. 
Zeuglodon Cetoides.—In addition to the foregoing remarks of Mr. 
Buckley, we take this opportunity of presenting an outline sketch of the 
head and one of the teeth of this animal, which were drawn for us by 
Mr. Russell Smith of Philadelphia, from the skeleton which has been 
fancifully called the Hydrarchos, by Koch. The head, as measured by 
Dr. Wyman,* is five feet seven inches long. “That part purporting 
Fig. 1. 
to be the cranium proper, and which serves more especially to protect 
the brain, consists apparently of a single bone and is destitute of any 
visible sutures, is a little more than one foot long, about, five inches 
wide, and has, attached laterally by cement, two bones forming incom- 
plete zygomatic arches. Inferiorly it is so much covered with cement, 
that little or nothing can be seen of its surface. Posteriorly there are 
no condyles, nor any foramen for the passage of the spinal marrow ; in 
fact no foramina are any where visible. These characters lead to the 
* Proceedings of the Boston Soc. of Nat. Hist., Nov. 1845, p. 65. 
Second Series, Vol. II, No. 4.—July, 1846. 17 130 
Scientific Intelligence. 
supposition that it is not the true cranium, but that it may be some bone 
or fragment not in its natural position. The size of the supposed cra- 
nium is obviously too small for lodging the brain of an animal 114 feet 
long, inasmuch as its cavity, if it had one, can exceed but little that of 
the spinal canal, which is visible in some of the vertebrae.” “ The jaw 
has been crushed by violence,” and the fragments, sometimes inverted, 
are held together by the natural matrix, in which the whole was origi- 
nally imbedded. 
Two of the cochleae of the ear of the Zeuglodon, were detected by 
Prof. H. D. Rogers,* among the loose bones of Koch’s collection. 
They are about the size of a 
small lemon, and display that 
variety of the whorled or con- 
voluted form of the cochlea, 
peculiar to the Cetacea. 
The teeth of this animal 
vary much in size and form, 
as may be seen by compar- 
ing the annexed figure with 
those lately published by Dr. 
Emmons,t from the skele- 
ton brought to Albany by 
Mr. Buckley, and also with 
those published by Dr. R. W. 
GibbesJ of South Carolina, 
under the name of Dorudon 
serratus. The figure here 
given shows very perfectly 
the yoked form of the teeth, 
from which Prof. Owen has 
derived the name Zeuglodon. 
It is one third less than the 
natural size. No perfect se- 
ries of the teeth of this ani- 
mal has yet been seen by a 
good anatomist, “ and we are 
therefore ignorant what are 
the varieties of form which 
such a series would present, 
Fig. 2. 
Two-thirds natural size, lineally. 
* Proceedings of the Boston Soc. of Nat. Hist., Nov, 1845, p. 79. 
t Am. Quarterly Journal of Agriculture and Science, vol. iii, p. 228. 
t Proceedings of the Acad, of Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia, June 1845, p. 254. Zoology. 
131 
in different parts of the same jaw.” It is interesting to know that the 
geographical range of this animal has been carried so far east as the 
Santee canal in South Carolina, from whence the teeth and portions 
of the jaw, figured by Prof. Gibbes, were taken, being imbeded in the 
green sand marl. 
With regard to the skeleton exhibited by Mr. Koch as the Hydrarchos, 
Dr. Wyman concludes, 1st, that these remains have never belonged to 
one and the same individual ; 2d, that the anatomical character of the 
teeth indicates that they are not those of a reptile, but of a warm-blood- 
ed mammal. It is worth mentioning, as an instance of the accuracy 
and skill of the joiner of the Hydrarchos, that the extremities of the 
so called paddles of this skeleton, were formed of “ casts of a came- 
rated shell, a species of nautilus” ! of which, specimens, brought 
from the state of Alabama, and now in the cabinet of the Academy of 
Natural Sciences, were shown to Prof. Wyman, by Dr. Morton of Phil- 
adelphia.* 
2. Mastodon Giganteus.—The publication of Prof. Owen’s “ British 
Fossil Mammalia and Birds,” has supplied us with the means of pre- 
senting our readers with a most perfect and elaborate portrait of the 
fine specimen of this animal, which is now standing in the British 
Museum. Mr. Owen says, (p. 298,) “ T*he almost complete skeleton 
of the Mastodon giganteus, so well known to the public as the “ Mis- 
souri Leviathan,” when exhibited, with a most grotesquely distorted 
and exaggerated collection of the bones in 1842 and 1843 in the Egyp- 
tian Hall, Piccadilly, but now mounted in strict accordance with its 
natural proportions, in the British Museum, has enabled me to present, 
in the subjoined cut, (see next page,) as perfect a representation of the 
mastodon, as that of the mammoth given at the head of the preceding 
section.”! 
* Having received more than one application from respectable persons, unac- 
quainted with comparative anatomy, to express an opinion as to the character of 
Koch’s Hydrarchos, we will only say, that if the foregoing remarks, the testimony 
of one of the best comparative anatomists in America; the evidence of Mr. Lyell 
and Mr. Houston, (vol. i, p. 313) and of Dr. Lister; (Proceedings Bost. Soc. Nat. 
Hist. Feb. 26, p. 94) are not sufficient to convince the most credulous of the ficti- 
tious character of this skeleton, perhaps their faith in the skill of the joiner may be 
enlightened by a perusal of the following note on the mastodon. It is certainly not 
impossible that a Zeuglodon may be found 114 feet long; but if constructed by 
the same inventor, we might as well expect to see it 300 feet in length. 
t Those who saw the “ grotesquely distorted” monster, which was shown by 
Mr. Koch in this country, as the Missourium or Leviathan, will hardly recognize 
in the beautiful drawing on the next page, the same animal as restored by the 
accurate hand of Owen. The large lithographic print of the animal as mounted 
by Koch, which this person had executed at Dresden, will serve to convey to 132 
Scientific Intelligence. 
In spite of much quackery and pretence, not only on the part of the 
notorious “ author of the two largest known animals,” (i. e. the “ Missou- 
rium” here figured, and the Hydrarchos,) but also, from those, whose 
position and opportunities should have produced better things,* we 
have at length settled quietly down upon the true and well ascertained 
characters of the great American mastodon. Dr. J. B. S. Jackson 
has given us a lucid statement of the principal osteological characters 
of the mastodon.f His observations were made on the skeleton found 
at Schooley’s Mountain in New Jersey in 1844, which was however 
deficient in the sternum, a few caudal vertebrse and the feet. 
He determined from this skeleton, that the animal had twenty dorsal 
vertebra, whereas Cuvier and Owen make but nineteen ; this observation 
is confirmed by the skeleton found at Newburghf last summer, (1845,) 
those who did not see this “ anatomical fiction,” a good idea of its awful pro- 
portions. It will be remembered as one characteristic of the genus “ Missou- 
rium,” that the tusks were placed at ninety degrees from their true position, 
pointing outward and backward. The trustees of the British Museum paid the 
owner, £1000 sterling (not “ £2000”) for this skeleton, and £300 additional for 
some accompanying bones. This we know from the very best authority. 
* Proceedings of the Geol. Soc., June 15, 1842. 
t Proceedings of the Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Oct. 1.1845, p. 60. 
| American Journal of Science, Second Series, i, 269. See also a letter of 
Dr. Warren's to Mr. Owen, published in the Ann. Mag. of Nat. Hist., for March, 
1846, No. iii, p. 145, in which he says the vertebral column has “ 7 cervical verte- 
bra, 20 dorsal, 3 lumbar, and the os sacrum.” The ribs, 20 in number, are perfect. 133 
and now in the possession of Dr. Warren.* Cuvier had suggested that 
one vertebral bone might be wanting, (Ossemens Fossiles,) and then 
that the number would be the same as in the elephant. The dentition 
of the animal has been satisfactorily made out by Mr. Owen, who finds 
seven teeth belonging to the series of the lower jaw, counting from the 
youngest. 
It may seem unnecessary to state that the genus Tetracaulodon of 
Godmanf, was clearly shown by Mr. Owen,! in 1842, to be only the 
immature state of both sexes of the Mastodon giganteus of Cuvier, 
and that in the male, one, at least, and usually the right, of the two 
lower tusks was retained, but that in the female both were lost as she 
approached maturity. 
* See also the Am. Quarterly Journal of Agriculture and Science, vol. ii, p. 203. 
t Transactions of the Am. Phil. Soc,, New Series, iii, 478. 
t Proceedings of the Geol. Soc., 1842.