Until lately it was supposed that the old red sandstone, or Devonian rocks, contained no vertebrate remains except those of fish, but in 1850 the footprints of a chelonian, and in 1851 the skeleton of a reptile, allied both to the batrachians and lizards, were found in a sandstone of that age near Elgin in Scotland.[212] Up to the year 1844 it was laid down as a received dogma in many works of high authority in geology, that reptiles were not created until after the close of the carboniferous epoch. In the course of that year, however, Hermann Von Meyer announced the discovery, in the coal measures of Rhenish Bavaria, of a reptile, called by him Apateon, related to the salamanders; and in 1847 three species of another genus, called archegosaurus by Goldfuss, were obtained from the coal of Saarbrück, between Treves and Strasburg. The footprints of a large quadruped, probably batrachian, had also been observed by Dr. King in the carboniferous rocks of Pennsylvania in 1844. The first example of the _bones_ of a reptile in the Coal of North America was detected so lately as September, 1852, by Mr. G. W. Dawson and myself in Nova Scotia. These remains, referred by Messrs. Wyman and Owen to a perennibranchiate batrachian, were met with in the interior of an erect fossil tree, apparently a sigillaria. They seem clearly to have been introduced together with sediment into the tree, during its submergence and after it had decayed and was standing as a hollow cylinder of bark, this bark being now converted into coal.