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Show 1022 DR. J. E. GRAY ON THE RHINOCEROTIDAE. [Dec. 12, Rhinoceros crossii, Gray, P. Z. S. 1854, p. 270 fig. (horns); Gerrard, Cat. Bones B. M . 282. Hab. Sumatra (Bell); Tavoy, near Siamese frontier (Blyth); Pegu (Theobald, B. Mi). There are two skulls of this species in the British Museum:- 1. Adult, with a roughness on the forehead and nose made by the roots of the horns, from Pegu. 2. A skull of a two-thirds-grown animal, with the seventh grinder just appearing; it has the forehead and nose smooth. This was received from the Zoological Society, and is probably from Sir Stamford Raffles's collection from Sumatra. The horn in the British Museum named R. crossii, I have no doubt, from the figure that Mr. Blyth gives of the skull (Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, 1862, t. 4), he is right in referring to this species. When I described this horn I was told bj* several persons that it was only the horn of an African Rhinoceros that had been artificially prepared and bent back after being boiled; but the colour and structure of the horn showed that that could not be the case, and that it was the horn of a Rhinoceros which I had not before seen. In the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons there is a beautiful skeleton (no. 2938) of this species, received from Sir Stamford Raffles. There are also three skulls of adult or nearly adult age,- viz. nos. 2935, 2936, and 2938; the latter is cut open longitudinally to show the brain-cavity. From the roughness on the forehead in the adult skull, the hinder horn must be situated further back in this species than in the African Rhinocerotes; the centre of the roughness is over the orbit. One of the skulls shows a rudimentary canine on one side of the upper jaw, placed in the front edge of the intermaxillary suture ; this animal was just obtaining its first permanent molar. The skull figured by Bell, and copied by Cuvier, represents the erect form of the occipital plane, as also does D e Blainville's figure of the skull of a female. Mr. Blyth, who has seen these animals alive, thinks the horn that I provisionally described as R. crossii is the horn of an adult male C. sumatranus. He says that the horns of the females are smaller than those of the males--observing, at the same time, that there is no difference in size in the horns of the two sexes of R. unicornis of India. In Bell's figure of the skull the intermaxillaries are represented as curved downwards. This may have been an individual peculiarity ; they are more or less bent down obliquely in the skulls I have seen, but always straight. The Rhinoceros de Java of M . F. Cuvier (Mamm. Lithogr.) is only a better figure of the R. sumatrensis. M. Cuvier, in the first edition of the ' Regne Animal,' says the Rhinoceros de Java is smaller than the R. sumatranus; but in the second edition he refers to his brother's figures in the 'Mamm. Lithogr.,' and alters his description; so that both R. sumatrensis and R. javanensis are established on the Sumatran Rhinoceros. • This species is erroneously called by Jardine, in the 'Naturalist's Library,' "R. sumatrensis, the Lesser one-homed Rhinoceros." |
