24 Professor Buckland on Pterodadylus Macronyx, 



has also ascertained, by the assistance of Mr Miller and Dr 

 Prout, that the small round black bodies, having a polished 

 surface, and resembling pebbles of jet, which occur mixed with 

 bones in the lowest strata of the lias on the banks of the Severn, 

 near Bristol, are varieties of coprolite : they appear to be co- 

 extensive with this bone-bed, and occur at many and very dis- 

 tant localities. He has also received from Mr Miller similar small 

 black fascal balls from a calcareous bed, nearly at the bottom of 

 the carboniferous hmestone at Bristol. This bed abounds with 

 teeth of sharks, and with bones, teeth, and spines of other fishes ; 

 and the coprolites in it may have been derived from small i-ep- 

 tiles, or from fishes ; and, in the case of the lias bone-bed, from 

 the molluscous inhabitants of fossil nautili, ammonites and be- 

 lemnites. In a collection at Lyme Regis, there is a fossil fish 

 from the lias, which has an ichthyo-coprus within its body ; and, 

 in Mr Mantel's collection of fishes, from the chalk near Lewis, 

 there are two specimens of the Amia Lewesiensis, each contain- 

 ing a coprolite within its scales and ribs : to these the author 

 proposes to assign the name of Amia-coprus. He also pro- 

 poses to designate the so-called bezoars, which are derived from 

 the ichthyosauri, by the name of Ichthyosauro-coprus ; and the 

 Album graecum of the fossil hyaenas by the name of Hyaena- 

 coprus. Dr Buckland has also recently ascertained the exist- 

 ence of coprolites in the Oxford oolite near Weymouth, and in 

 the Kimmeridge clay near Oxford. About four years ago he 

 found, in Mr Mantell's collection of bones of various reptiles 

 from the Hasting's sandstone of Tilgate Forest, balls of faecal 

 matter, differing in shape from those of the ichthyosaurus. To 

 some of these reptiles he refers the coprolites in question ; and 

 conjectures that Sauro-copri will be found, wherever the remains 

 of saurians are abundant. Dr Buckland has also coprolites 

 found by Mr Richardson, in the green sand of Wiltshire, and 

 by Miss Anning in green sand near Lyme. 



As soon as Dr Buckland had estabhshed, by a series of speci- 

 mens, that the balls of ichthyosauro-coprus were composed of a 

 lamina of earthy phosphate of lime, wrapped spirally round it- 

 self, it occurred to him that this structure is so similar to that 

 of the supposed fir-cones or iuli in the chalk and chalk-marl, that 

 he immediately conjectured these so long misnamed iuli, to be 



