Note on Ovibos moschatus , Blainville

Abstract

C uvier has given the history of three skulls of Ovibos moschatus discovered in Siberia, and figured by Pallas and Ozeretskovsky‡. In 1846 M. Giebel§ noticed the existence, in the Museum of Halle, of part of a skull found in the neighbourhood of Merseburg. In 1852, Sir John Richardson, in the ‘Zoology of the Herald,’ gave a list and some figures of some remains of Ovibos moschatus brought from the Bay of Eschscholtz, with bones of Elephants, Reindeer, and other Mammals. In 1855 Professor Owen∥ described, under the name of Bos moschatus , a fine fragment of skull of Ovibos moschatus , discovered by the Rev. Mr. Kingsley and Mr. Lubbock at Maidenhead, in Berkshire, on a bed of low level-gravel, of which Mr. Prestwich gave at the same time a description ¶, with a sketch of the bed, in which he afterwards found an Elephant's tooth. In the third edition of the ‘Antiquity of Man’ Sir Charles Lyell further cites a skull of Ovibos moschatus found by Mr. Lubbock, near Bromley, Kent, in the valley of a small affluent of the Thames; and also two other skulls, male and female, discovered in the drift of the Avon, near Bath Easton, by Mr. Charles Moore*. In the same page of the ‘Antiquity of Man’ Sir Charles Lyell further mentions a skull of Ovibos moschatus preserved in the Museum of Berlin, and which Mr. Quenstedt had determined in the year 1836; but I have failed, even with the indications given by Sir Charles Lyell