Page:VCH Norfolk 1.djvu/63

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PALiEONTOLOGY Rev, F. Buxton, is believed to have come from the Forest Bed ; while the same origin is attributed to a specimen preserved in the Cambridge Museum which appears to have been dredged from the North Sea. Whether or no either or both of these skulls really came from the Forest Bed, they indisputably serve to indicate the occurrence of the musk ox (which is now restricted to Greenland and Arctic America) in East Anglia at or about the time when that formation was deposited. An imperfect skull of a sheep from Overstrand, now in the collection of the British Museum, indicates a species apparently allied to the living Asiatic mufflon {Ovis orientalis) of Asia Minor. Antlers and other remains of deer are of exceedingly common occurrence in the Forest Bed, but a great number of unnecessary species have been made upon the evidence of these remains, which are for the most part in a very imperfect condition. One very well characterized form is the Forest Bed elk {Alces latifrons). The modern red deer {Cervus elaphus) was also in existence at the epoch in question, as is attested by well-preserved specimens of the antlers from the peaty bed at Kessingland. A fallow deer is also indicated by antlers from the Forest Bed to which the name Cervus savini has been applied ; but it seems very doubtful whether this animal is really separable from C. browniy previously described from the superficial deposits of Clacton in Essex. Upon the evidence of more or less imperfect antlers of different ages a number of nominal species of Forest Bed deer, such as C. verticornis, C. gunni, C. Jitchi, and C. daivkinsi, have been described ; but these are now ascertained to belong to a race of the giant Irish deer, for which the proper name seems to be C. giganteus belgrandi. Antlers of the roebuck have been recorded from the superficial deposits of the Norfolk coast, but there is some degree of doubt as to their being from the Forest Bed. Very remarkable are the two deer from the Forest Bed and the Upper Pliocene deposits of the Continent now known as Anoglochis sedgwicki and A. tetraceros. In both the antlers resemble those of the American deer of the genus Mazama in the absence of a brow-tine and the dichotomous forking of the beam ; those of the species first named being remarkable for their size and complexity, whereas those of the latter are simpler and have but five tines. This by no means exhausts the list of deer which have been named from the Forest Bed, although all the well-defined types have been mentioned. Remains of the Pleistocene race of the hippopotamus {Hippopotamus amphibius major) were recorded so long ago as 1833 by Dr. S. Woodward in his Geology of Norfolk, and other specimens have been obtained sub- sequently. Teeth and other remains of the wild boar [Sus scrofa ferus) likewise occur in the same deposits. Teeth of the wild horse {Equus caballus fossilis) are also met with in the Norfolk Forest Bed, as are those of the extinct Continental Pliocene species known as E. stemnis. Although the woolly rhinoceros seems to have been unknown at this epoch in Britain, the genus is represented in the deposits under considera- tion by Falconer's rhinoceros {Rhinoceros etruscus)^ an extinct species first 1 33 D