EXTINCT WHALES AND WOMBATS 301 



That whales were contemporary with the mammoth in this 

 country is proved by an interesting discovery made in the year 

 1828, in a cliff near Brighton, under the following circumstances. 

 On the face of the cliff, in the ancient shingle which lies immedi- 

 ately upon the chalk, some fishermen had observed a huge bone 

 that had been laid bare by an unusually high tide, and now pro- 

 jected two or three feet beyond the face of the cliff. Unable to 

 remove it, they broke off the extremity, and sent a fragment of it 

 to Dr. Mantell, who went to the spot a few days afterwards, and 

 found that they had demolished a considerable portion of the bone 

 in their attempts to remove it from its bed, and had only desisted 

 from fear of being buried beneath the overhanging cliff, which is 

 composed of loose materials. At last, and not without some 

 danger, the entire specimen was left exposed. It proved to be the 

 front nine feet of the left branch of the lower jaw of a whale-bone 

 whale. On attempting to remove the specimen it broke into a 

 thousand pieces. So, as the tide was approaching, this interesting 

 find had to be abandoned. It must have belonged to a whale 

 from sixty to seventy feet long. 



Some of the ancient kangaroos of Australia, that lived during 

 the Pleistocene period, were very much larger than those we see 

 now in that country. One of the most remarkable of the extinct 

 marsupials of Australia was the Diprotodon, of which a skull, 

 measuring nearly three feet in length, may be seen in the Natural 

 History Museum, and it was so named on account of its two front 

 teeth. The creature itself was probably even larger than a rhino- 

 ceros of the present day (standing six feet high), and is believed 



