180 



STUDIES IN TASMANIAN MAMMALS, LIVING AND 

 EXTINCT. 



No. VI. 



CETACEAN REMAINS FROM THE FOSSIL BEDS AT 

 WYNYARD. 



By 



H. H. Scott, Curator, Launceston Museum, 



And 

 Clive Lord, Curator, Tasmanian Museum. 



(Read 5th December, 1921.) 



We desire to place on record a few notes relating to the 

 discovery of certain Cetacean remains from the assumed 

 Miocene beds at the Wynyard Cliffs, North- West Tasmania. 



Our latest additions consist of parts of the embedded 

 centra and processes of some twenty vertebras, which in 

 superficial osteology agree fairly closely with those of the 

 modern Globicephalus whales, and depart, as equally, from 

 such Squalodont remains as we have handled from this 

 locality. 



Early in the year 1914 Messrs. E. D. and R. N. Atkin- 

 son presented to the Launceston Museum a small slab of 

 rock, much infiltrated with silicon, containing a fossil that 

 was determined as the supra-orbital portion of a Delphinoid 

 skull that had been stripped of its overlying maxillary wing, 

 prior to its inclusion in the matrix. The donors, upon ex- 

 tended research, were able to unearth, at some distance 

 from the first discovery, a piece of fossil bone that presented 

 every appearance of being the missing maxillary wing, it 

 having evidently been swept hither and thither upon the old 

 Miocene beach until it eventually found a resting place. 



These remains were plotted out in terms of modern 

 Cetaceans and were found to agree in several points with 



