The Woodwardian specimens as collected were placed in the hands of Prof. Owen, and were first made known in the Professor's lectures on reptiles and birds delivered at the Museum of Practical Geology in 1858. In that year Prof. Owen communicated to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and printed in their Report, the matter of the memoir which was published with plates by the Palæontographical Society in 1859. In this latter year Prof. Owen communicated to the Royal Society an account of the vertebral column of Pterodactyles. In 1859 Prof. Owen also produced a classification of recent and fossil reptiles at the meeting of the British Association, in which the order Pterosauria appears with new characters--such as the pneumatic structure of most of the bones--drawn from Cambridge specimens. In 1860 Prof. Owen produced another memoir on Pterodactyles, which was published by the Palæontographical Society. A brief account of the tribe appeared about the same time in the Professor's _Palæontology_. In these writings are descriptions of the various parts of the vertebral column. Their procœlian centra are described, and the pneumatic foramina are noticed and supposed to have communicated with air-cells. They are compared with birds, and distinguished from birds; but although the order is classed with reptiles no contrast with reptiles is made. Other bones described are a basi-occipital, and a doubtful bone, then thought to be a frontal, but which is more like the neural region of the sacrum. The sternum is compared with the sternum of the birds Apteryx and Aptenodytes, is stated to be formed, in the main, on the Ornithic type, and to possess distinct synovial articular cavities for the coracoids such as only occur in birds. The inter-coracoid process of the sternum is compared with that of Bats, Birds, and Crocodiles. The mechanism of the framework of the wings is said to be much more bird-like than bat-like, the anchylosed scapula and coracoid being remarkably similar to those of a bird of flight. The coracoid is shorter and straighter in birds than in Pterodactyles, but no comparisons are made with reptiles. The humerus is known only by the proximal end. It is said to conform at its proximal end more with the Crocodilian than with the Avian type, but to have the radial crest much more developed than in either Crocodile or Bird. The bone is, however, chiefly compared with birds, and is figured between corresponding bones of a Vulture and a Crocodile. The pneumatic texture is said to be as well marked as in any bird of flight. Of the carpus it is said, the Pterodactyle, in the complete separation of the metacarpus from the antibrachium by two successive carpals answering to the two rows, adheres more closely to the reptilian type than to that of birds. But the row which was regarded as proximal is the distal row, while the supposed distal row is proximal.