The discovery of this tooth in the Kansas Coal Measures is of great interest, proving, as it does, the presence of true labyrinthodonts from a lower horizon than elsewhere recorded. The discovery of Eobaphetes kansensis Moodie in the Carboniferous of Washington County ([473]) would seem to indicate another labyrinthodont. The tooth from Louisville was possibly not the first evidence of labyrinthodonts in North America, since the discovery by Marsh of Eosaurus acadianus from the Coal Measures of Nova Scotia, possibly a member of the Stereospondylia, antedates this discovery 30 years. The specimen is preserved in the Museum at the University of Kansas.
AMPHIBIAN FOOTPRINTS FROM THE COAL MEASURES.
Footprints may be said to be fairly common in the Coal Measures of North America. Especial attention has been given to the classification of these objects by G. F. Matthew ([408-413]), Dawson ([208-210]) and others. Hay ([317, pp. 538-553]) has given a catalogue of all the species described from the Coal Measures of North America, to which the reader is referred for further information in regard to these interesting evidences of former animal activities. The writer has not been interested in the taxonomy of footprints, but has studied such as have come to his notice ([465]). A description of the species Dromopus agilis Marsh ([fig. 43]) is given here, because there is a large slab in the University of Kansas Museum which has not been figured. Since the chief interest in the present contribution is morphology, footprints are thus scantily dealt with. Leidy ([374]), Dawson ([207]), Moodie ([465, pl. LXIV, fig. 1]) and others have given various brief descriptions of Coal Measures footprints, probably all of which are evidences of Amphibia which are otherwise unknown.
Dromopus agilis Marsh.
Marsh, Jour. Sci. (3), XLVIII, p. 82, pl. ii, fig. 3; pl. iii, fig. 3, 1894.
Hay, Bull. U. S. Geol. Surv., No. 179, p. 543, 1902.
Type: Specimen in the Yale University Museum.
Horizon and locality: Osage limestone (Coal Measures), near Osage City, Kansas.
In 1894 Professor Marsh described a collection of footprints which he had secured from Professor B. F. Mudge, of Manhattan, Kansas, who had collected them in Osage County, Kansas, in a rock quarry, having purchased a large quantity of rock from the quarrymen for that purpose. A preliminary note by Mudge ([490]) was published in the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science and late r copied in the American Journal of Science. Professor Marsh's description ([406]) of the remains is as follows:
"The impressions are well preserved in a calcareous shale, which separates readily into thin slabs, each representing a surface of the beach at the time the footprints were made upon it. A few shells in the shale are sufficient to prove that the formation is marine (no shells are evident in the slab at the Museum of the University of Kansas, but the slab is quite arenaceous). Trails of annelids, or perhaps of other invertebrates, are seen on some of the surfaces. The footprints of vertebrate animals, however, are of paramount importance, and the large number and variety of these here recorded on a single surface, if they could be rightly interpreted, would form an interesting chapter of land vertebrate life in the Carboniferous, about which so little is at present known."