Zsivny Viktor (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 30. (Budapest 1936)

Fejérváry, G. J.: Notes on a very little-known lizard: Lacerta princeps Blanf., with description of the male specimen preserved in the Vienna Natural History Museum

fixation of (originally) foetal characters. Such special form of Neoteny is certainly a degenerative symptom, marking that much advanced phase of evolutional development which is known, since HAECKEL, as Paracme. In the case of functionally conditioned structures one may sometimes be at a loss with respect to the correct interpretation oî features that appear to consist such post-embryonic fixation of foetal characters, for configurational details implied by developmental mechanism in the embryo may be supposed to be simply coincident with such structures in the adult, which are manifest consequences of some long lasted process of functional adaptation Jbaving obtained in earlier generations of the respective euthygenetical line. In the case of the fontanel, however, we do not face such complex conditions. We only face a rather plain process of purely embryogenetically conditioned osteogenesis taking place in a connective tissue belonging to the mebraneous kind of the series. So far as I am informed, the evolutionary importance of postembryonally fixed foetal characters was, up to now, put forward only in the case of Man. I wish herewith to point at the -embodiment of the same developmental principle in a group of Reptiles. For it is clear to me that the „Archaeolacertae" DE MÉHELY'S (12 and 13) are not ancestral forms, they type being, on the contrary, the at present most developed condition of the family they belong to. The „Neolacertae" DE MÉHELY'S are, on the other hand, in opposition to DE MÉHELY'S opinion, the more protoplasmatic members of the Lacertidae, as very correctly suggested by BOULENGER (5, p. 247—256). The species belonging to the latter morphological — not genetico-systematical. .as pretended by DE MÉHELY — group have not yet attained that much advanced phase in the process of phylogenetical „desossification", which has been entered by the „Archaeolacertae"

. In the „osseous" Lizards the fontanel ossifies in due time and only ,.accidental" cases of a — phylogenetically incipient, ontogenetically more or less durable — persistence of the fontanel occur within their range, whilst in the „membraneous" Lizards the fontanel becomes definitively persistent, being in earlier stages of individual life comparatively larger than in coeval specimens of the „osseous" Lacertids, a fact due to the slower rate of ossification ever gaining in prevalence with the evolutional advancement of the species. There are forms, such as L. ocellata subsp. -pater, in which I found (in a specimen labelled from Tunis) an ossified fontanel (established by pal-