Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/71

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PALEONTOLOGY also in the York Museum, is known from the nodule bed at Wood- bridge ; while the Museum of the Geological Survey possesses a com- plete upper molar from Butley.' The latter specimen serves to indi- cate that the Crag panda was about a third larger than the living Himalayan species. Panda remains have been subsequently obtained from certain Tertiary strata on the continent, a complete skull forming the type of a distinct genus. To some extent, perhaps, connecting the pandas with the more typical bears is the extinct Hycenarctus, first described from the Plio- cene strata of northern India, but subsequently found in Europe. The only known evidence of the occurrence of this primitive bear-like animal in Britain is afforded by certain teeth from the nodule bed of the Suffolk Red Crag. One of these specimens, an upper molar, was obtained near Waldringfield, and is preserved in the Ipswich Museum, while a second upper molar, from Felixstow, is in the York Museum. The latter collection also contains a lower molar and a tusk, both from Felixstow, which probably belong to the same genus. It is to the late Sir W. H. Flower^ that we owe the identification of Hycenarctus in the Red Crag. Some doubt exists as to whether remains of typical bears occur in the Crag deposits, certain specimens which have been described as such having apparently been misinterpreted. According however to Mr. Newton,* a tooth from the nodule bed of Woodbridge, preserved in the Museum at York, may possibly belong to the small bear first described from the Pliocene deposits of the Auvergne under the name of JJrsus arvernensis. A single tusk, or canine tooth, from the crag of Kessingland, preserved in the Museum at Wisbech, indicates an undetermined carni- vore apparently distinct from all the foregoing. Several of the molluscs met with in the Red Crag indicate the pre- valence in Britain at the time of the deposition of these strata of arctic or sub-arctic conditions ; and this is confirmed by the occurrence in the nodule bed of the Red Crag of the county of portions of tusks of a large walrus [Odobcetius huxleyi), such remains having been first described in 1865 by Professor E. Ray Lankester ^ as Trichecodon. Till recently the walrus was known as T'richechus^ but the earlier name Odobcenus is now coming into general use. The Crag being a shore deposit it is only natural to expect that it would contain the remains of seals ; and as a matter of fact bones of those animals do occur there, although far from abundantly. Of Suffolk specimens, a bone of the fore-limb (humerus) in the collection of Major E. C. Moor of Great Bealings, from the nodule bed of Foxhall, has been made the type of a species with the name of Phoca moori. There is a similar bone, from the same horizon at Waldringfield, in the Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street. P. moori was a seal of small bodily 1 Newton, ^art. Jount. Geol. Soc. xlvi. p. 13 (1890). '^ Ibid, xxxiii. 534 (1877). ' See Newton, op. cit. p. 15. * Ibid. p. 16. ^ ^art. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxi. 226. 35