Extinct Lizards from Upper Pliocene Deposits of Kansas / Extinct Toads and Salamanders from Middle Pliocene Beds of Wallace and Sherman Counties, Kansas

Abstract

The state of Kansas is widely known for its fossil-bearing rock strata, which have yielded a great number and variety of extinct vertebrate animals that lived in past ages. For the most part, the vertebrate fossils that are best known belong to the larger forms of mammals, reptiles, and fishes, inasmuch as these are usually the first to be collected. This is probably due to the fact that fossilized bones of the larger animals are more readily discovered and more easily excavated. The faunas of the past, however, did not consist merely of large animals. Just as today we find small species living in the same regions with the larger species, so we may expect the same to be true of past geological periods or epochs.

I have undertaken to find out something about the varieties of these small forms, particularly, the species of lizards, snakes, frogs, toads, and salamanders that lived during late Pliocene time in Kansas; to ascertain their relationships with the present living forms; and to determine whether they throw any light on the climatic conditions that existed in the past, when camels, rhinoceroses, peccaries, three-toed horses, and mastodons were typical large mammals of the state.

This paper treats only of the lizards of the upper Pliocene deposits in Kansas. Four species are here reported for the first time. That this is a significant number is evident when we realize that only three species of lizards have been heretofore known from all of Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene time in North America. One of the three is a horned-toad, one a collared lizard, and these two have been referred to the living genera Phrynosoma and Crotaphytus, respectively; one, which is from the Miocene, has been made the type of a new genus, having no known living representatives.

In this paper one genus and four species of lizards are described from the upper Pliocene beds of Meade County, Kansas. These are Eumecoides, n. gen. (Scincidae?), genotype E. hibbardi, n. sp., E. mylocoelus, n. sp., Eumeces striatulatus, n. sp. (Scincidae), and Cnemidophorus bilobatus, n. sp. (Teiidae).

The first two species are small lizards whose relationship is not clear. They are placed in a new genus, and referred, with some doubt, to the family of the skinks. The third species is a skink of the widely distributed genus Eumeces, which has living representatives in Africa, Asia, and North America. The fourth species is a whiptail lizard, belonging to a living genus, and to a family which is confined to the western hemisphere.