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

pátion), at a very early age already, long before the specimen would have passed that threshold of individual development which separates the young from the halfgrown. In typical specimens of L. ocellata (from Portugal), on the other hand, the fontanel appears to subsist much longer, being still comparatively large in young individuals that are about double of the size of the juvenile pater just recorded. Of course, we must not forget that the typical L. ocellata is of a somewhat larger habit than pater, such dimensional difference apparently setting in at a rather early period of post-embryonic development already. On the strength of such visualization it is evident that DE MÉHELY'S „Archaeolacertae" are not epistatic in the Eimerian, i. e. phylogenetical, sense of the word. They are not lower organized forms persisting on such low grade of evolutional development, alias: they are not arrested at some early stage of epacmic evolution. They are, as stated above, n e o t e n i c to a certain degree, for the histogenetic process of bone-formation is arrested at an earlier stage of individual development, a juvenile (partly embryonic) condition of the skull thus getting fixed in the adult. This sort of Neoteny fixed through many generations means phylogenetical degeneration which is characteristic of paracmic evolution, and such arrest in individual development has nothing to do with phylogenetic arrest, or epistasis, the latter not being preceded, in earlier euthygenetic forerunners, by a more perfect state of full individual development, which evidently obtains in the case of the „Archaeolacertian" ascendence. L. princeps belongs, in craniological respect, to the Lizards I designated, in this place, as ,.o s s e o u s". The type of its skull is pyramidocephalous, this character too being, together with the bony armour of the temporal region, an archaic one, which statement agrees with the views emitted on the subject by EIMER, BOULENGER and WERNER, being contrary to the inverted phylogenetical interpretation of facts given by DE MÉHELY. It is not without interest to point out, in the case of L. princeps, that a more primitive phylogenetical condition of the skull is combined with a much advanced evolutional state of the livery. Cases of a manifest discrepancy obtaining between the degree of evolutional development of skeletal elements on the one hand and livery on the other, are not at all unfrequently to be met with in any group of Vertebrates. In some of the instances it is the skeleton that will prove to be more advanced along the line of its phyletical