Jávorka Sándor - Soós Lajos (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 29. (Budapest 1935)

Fejérváry, G. J.: Further contributions to a monograph of the Megalanidae and fossil Varanidae - with notes on recent Varanians

international scientific contact was subjected to, during the Great War _ W

ere not available to me at that time. Very remarkable are, in the literature published since 1918 on the subject, the papers dealing with the American Varanian Saniva, and with the famous „Koniodo Dragon", Placovaranus komodoënsis Ouw., respectively. There is, moreover, a most remarkable literary communication I owe to the obliging courtesy of Mr. HEBER A. LONGMAN, Director of the Queensland Museum, Brisbane, Australia, which claims further discussion of the zygosphene and zygantrum question in Megalania, such discussion aiming at the correct valuation of the osteological feature concerned. Besides the results owing to the examination of the material referred to here above, the present Monograph also contains data due to a re-examination of some of the originals described and figured in my earlier publication on the subject; these specimens belong to the Roy. Hungarian Geological Survey, and the statements concerned are, in the case of V. marathonensis W EITH., complemented by the communication of such facts that are evidenced by new finds collected, by DR. TH. KORMOS, "in S. Hungary. Thus, on the grounds of autoptical investigation on the one hand, and literary information on the other, a remarkable set of details have been elucidated by the writer, which fact requires a thorough systematical and diagnostical revision of the whole Suborder Platynota to which both Megalanidae and Varanidae belong. The lines along which such systematical and diagnostical revision shall be carried out in the following pages, are, with respect to the methodics to which the writer applied throughout his work, essentially bionomical, and not merely descriptive. The characters of the fossil organism will always be considered in their coherence with those set forth by the recent one next allied to it, and morphological features will always be valued in the suggestive light of phylogenetical and functional analysis. Thus, the diagnostical importance and significance of the characters accessible to our knowledge will be established by keeping to really natural, and not artificial, moments, in order that the System thus founded should be entitled to claim the rank of a Natural one, i. e. of one that is based upon genetical relation. From the fact of constantly referring the reader to details afforded by the study of the recent organism, it quite naturally follows that he will find in this work a series of evidences that bear on the anatomy of living forms, for it is only by applying to these that