A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK of extinct land mammals from the nodule bed of the Red Crag to be derived from older deposits. ' There is indeed,' he writes, ' no more evidence for the existence of Mastodon in England during any part of the Crag era than for that of Hipparion or of the Eocene Hyracotherium.^ Against this view maybe urged the occurrence oi Mastodon arvernensis in the Upper Pliocene deposits of the Auvergne and Val d'Arno, and above all in the British Pliocene cave recently discovered near Buxton. Other and apparently somewhat less common types of tympanic from the nodule bed of the Red Crag of the county are of a more rounded and shell-like character, and indicate extinct species of those groups of whalebone whales respectively known as humpbacks and finners or rorquals. To a humpbacked whale from the Belgian Crag described by Professor Van Beneden as Megaptera affinis, are apparently referable two tympanies in the Museum of Practical Geology ; the one from the Coral- line Crag of Sudbourn, and the other from the nodule bed of the Red Crag near Ipswich. Another species of the same genus, M. similis, like- wise typically (as is the third) from the Belgian Crag, is represented by a periotic bone in the British Museum from Woodbridge ; while a third and smaller form, M. minuta, is known in England by one ear-bone from the Coralline Crag of Suffolk in the Museum at Ipswich, and a second from the nodule bed of the Red Crag at Foxhall in the Museum of Practical Geology. Of the rorquals, whose tympanic bones are of a more elongated form than those of the humpbacks, two Red Crag species, Balcenoptera definita and B. emarginata, were originally described by Owen (as Balcena) on the evidence of tympanies from the nodule bed of the county. Two other species, B. goropi and B. borealina, first described from the Belgian Crag, appear to be represented in the nodule bed of the county by tympanies in the collection of the British and Ipswich Museums. But even these last by no means exhaust the list of Suffolk Crag cetaceans, for certain remains from that deposit have been identified with species of two extinct genera of rorquals named by continental writers Cetotherium and Herpetocetus. One of these species, C. brialmonti, appears to be represented by a vertebra from the Red Crag in the British Museum, and a second, C. dubium, by tympanies from the nodule bed in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and other collections. Certain vertebrae from the Red Crag of Suffolk may perhaps pertain to the Belgian species known as C. hupschi and C. brevifrons. A tym- panic bone in the Museum of Practical Geology from Felixstow, and a second in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, indicate the occurrence in Suffolk of the species described in Belgium as Herpetocetus scaldiensis. With the last-named species we come to the end of the whalebone whales, and pass on to the toothed group, commencing with the forms allied to the modern sperm-whale. Large teeth of the general type of those of the latter are met with commonly enough in the Red Crag nodule bed of the county, but owing to their damaged condition their 40
