Tooth-inarl'H of Thylacoleo. 93 



Pejark Marsh, which is of some considerable extent, occupies 

 a slightly depressed area of country lying mostly to the east 

 of the road running due north from Terang township to Mount 

 Noorat, in the county of Hampden, and was, it is said, originally 

 covered with a thick growth of tea- tree scrub and eucalypts. A 

 channel w^as made about twenty years ago to drain the Marsh, 

 and the water is carried by a culvert under the Noorat road at 

 a point just about a mile distant from the Terang post office. 

 It was here and at several places for a quarter of a mile along 

 the channel to the west that our excavations were made. Near 

 the culvert a shaft showed some three feet of heavy black 

 alluvial soil, eighteen inches of volcanic tuff, and five feet of 

 black clay, passing into a yellow clay. The black clay is not 

 clearly defined from the underlying yellow clay, but blends into 

 it, unlike the volcanic tuff, which is sharply marked off from 

 the soil above and the black clay below, and stands out like a 

 ledge in parts of the drain where the clay has fallen away from 

 beneath it. 



Just at the junction of the two cla^^s the majority of the 

 bones occurred, including all the larger pieces, for practically 

 the whole of the specimens are fragmentary. About a quarter 

 of a mile west of the culvert the black clay bed becomes 

 thinner, and near the bottom of it, and apparently immediately 

 over the yellow clay, a black nodular cement makes its appear- 

 ance; and just above it, in its surface layer, were a few fragments of 

 bones, blackened by manganese oxide where they had been enclosed 

 in the cement. In the excavations near the culvert the proximity 

 of the yellow clay was generally indicated by the presence of 

 a few hardish, brown, ironstone nodules. At a dei:)th of three 

 and a-half feet in the yellow clay, and about thirteen feet from 

 the surface, the clay V)ecame harder, and red in colour. Sink- 

 ing then became too difficult, on account of water, and a crow- 

 bar was driven down in the bottom of the cut. 



At three feet the bar entered a softer stratum, from which 

 water freely flowed through the hole made by the bar, showing 

 that the water-bearing bed from which the residents obtain 

 their supplies had ])een pierced. What that bed consists of 

 could, therefore, not be ascertained, but, presumably, it is the 

 soft fossiliferous limestone seen alono the shores of Lake Keilam- 



