Skeleton of Phenacodus

Abstract

ALL readers of the American Naturalist must be familiar with a striking woodcut of the entire skeleton of a peculiar fossil Ungulate, which occurs throughout a long series of numbers among the advertisements, and bears the following somewhat startling subscription, viz. “The five-toed horse—the ancestor of lemurs and man.” This figure we are enabled, through the courtesy of Prof. Cope, to reproduce in the accompanying woodcut. The name given by its describer, Prof. E. D. Cope, of Philadelphia, to the animal of which the skeleton is so marvellously preserved, is Phenacodus primævus; the genus forming one of the best-known representatives of that very curious extinct group of generalized Ungulates for which the Professor has proposed the name Condylarthra.