Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/75

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PALAEONTOLOGY ever provisionally assigned by Mr. Newton to the existing European beaver [Castor fiber). Certain other beaver teeth from the same horizon at Sutton and other localities in the county have been made the types of a distinct species by Professor Lankester with the name of C. veterior. From the characters of the folds of the cheek-teeth, as compared with those of the living beaver, Mr. Newton confirms the distinctness of this species. The type specimens are in the York Museum, but there are others at Ipswich. Remains of the rabbit have been stated to occur in the Crag, but the evidence on which the statement is made is not forthcoming. Mr. Newton records however a cheek-tooth of some species of Lepus from the Red Crag. Remains of whales, porpoises and dolphins are exceedingly common in the Suffolk Crag, as they also are in the Belgian Crag at Antwerp. In the case of the larger whalebone whales, the remains most easy of identification, and also those most commonly found, are the bones of the internal ear, of which one (the tympanic) is hollow and shell-like, while the other (the periotic) is solid and massive. In the beaked whales, on the other hand, the part most commonly preserved is the solid ivory-like rostrum, or beak, from which the group takes its name. Of the larger toothed whales akin to the modern sperm-whale, teeth are the most abundant remains. As early as 1843 Sir R. Owen' named some of these Crag cetaceans on the evidence of ear bones, and others from their teeth. A revision of cetaceans from the Crag was published by the present writer^ at a much later date. Tympanic bones from the nodule bed of the Red Crag of the county indicate by their shape so-called ' right-whales,' that is to say species allied to the Greenland whale and southern right- whale of the present seas. To one of these types Owen gave the name Balcena affinis ; while a second appears identical with the right-whale from the Belgian Crag described by the late Professor Van Beneden as B. primigenia. Certain variations noticeable in the form of the ear-bones of these whales may be due to differences in the age of the individuals to which they belonged. Tympanies of a much smaller right-whale from the Red Crag have been identified with the two Belgian species B. insignis and B. balcenopsis. The first vertebra of a whale from the Coralline Crag of Sudbourn, in the collection of the British Museum, was referred by Van Beneden himself to the last- mentioned species. It may be well to observe here that as the tympanic and other bones of whales found in the Belgian Crag, belonging to the same species as those from the Red Crag, are not rolled, it is evident that the whales of whose skeletons they formed a part Hved in the Pliocene seas, and it therefore follows that the whales of the Red Crag likewise lived about the time when that deposit was laid down. It may also be men- tioned that Mr. F. W. Harmer' considers the majority of the remains 1 Pm. Geol. Soc. iv. 283 ; see also ^art. Joum. Geol. Soc. i. 39, and Brit. Foss. Mamm. and Birds. 2 ^lart. Joum. Geol. Soc. xliii. 7, and Cat. Foss. Mamm. Brit. Mus. v. 16. ' ^art. Joum. Geol. Soc. Ivi. 728 (1900). 39