214 The Ottawa Naturalist. [February 



NOTES ON THE SKELETON OF A WHITE WHALE OR 

 BELUGA, RECENTLY DISCOVERED IN PLEIS- 

 TOCENE DEPOSITS AT PAKEN- 

 HAM, ONTARIO. 



By J. F. Whiteaves. 



In August, 1849, portions of the skeleton of a small cetacean 

 were discovered in stratified clay of pleistocene age " on the line 

 of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in the Township of Char- 

 lotte " (Vermont) " about twelve miles south of Burlington, and a 

 little more than one mile eastward of Lake Champlain." These 

 remains were described and figured by the late Professor Zadock 

 Thompson, in the American Journal of Science and Arts for March, 

 1850, under the provisional name Delphinus VermohMniis, which 

 he changed to Beluga Vermontana, in 1853, in an Appendix to the 

 " History of Vermont." But it is now quite clear that they 

 belong to the genus Delphinapterus, Lacepede, of which Beluga, 

 Rafinesque, is a synonym. 



More or less complete skeletons of this small whale have 

 since been found in marine deposits of pleistocene age, at Montreal 

 in 1858; at Riviere du Loup (en bas) in 1864 or 1865 (detached 

 bones only); at Cornwall, Ont., in 1870 ; and on the Jacquet 

 River, N. B., in 1874. By far the most perfect of these is the fine 

 specimen from Cornwall in the museum of the Geological Survey 

 of Canada. It is a nearly perfect skeleton of an adult individual, 

 which, as now mounted, is a little more than twelve feet in length, 

 though a few of the vertebrae are missing. These Canadian speci- 

 mens, and especially the Cornwall one, have led to the conclusion 

 that Thompson's Beluga Vermontana is probably identical, both 

 specifically and generically, with the common White Whale or 

 Beluga (Delp/unapterus leucas) now so abundant, in a living state, 

 in the lower St. Lawrence and North Atlantic. In his latest list 

 of the fossils Df the pleistocene of eastern Canada (Canadian Ice 

 Age. 1893, P- 2 8) Sir J. W. Dawson says: "there seems no 

 good reason to believe that the B. Vermontana of Thompson, from 

 the pleistocene of Vermont, is distinct from B catodon," Gray, 

 which, it may be added, is another well known synonym of 



