Age of the Elgin Sandstones 1 79 



Oct. 3ist, i86th meeting. Dr. Hooker read extracts 

 of a letter from Dr. Hector, written on Sept. iyth from 

 Wellington, New Zealand, in which he said that he had 

 forwarded to England specimens of chert flakes found in 

 cooking ovens with moa bones, together with bones of the 

 embryo chick from the egg of that bird, and drawings of the 

 egg and bones. 



Professor Huxley referred to a discussion which had 

 taken place some ten years previously about the age of 

 the reptiliferous sandstones of Elgin, and stated that he 

 had recently obtained evidence in favour of referring them 

 to a more modern age than the Devonian. The quarries at 

 Coton End in Warwickshire, which are worked in sandstones 

 not older than Permian, have furnished fragments of 

 Hyperodapedon, the most characteristic of the Elgin reptiles. 

 A no less interesting fact is the discovery of its remains in 

 India, in strata which are believed to belong to the same 

 series as the Damuda beds, in which Labyrinth odonts, 

 with Dicynodonts and other reptiles, have been discovered. 

 So these beds, with the South African rocks containing 

 Labyrinthodonts and Dicynodonts, are probably all of the 

 same age, and thus, as Professor Oldham has suggested, all 

 three may be neither Permian nor Trias, but passage beds 

 between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic. 1 



Professor Huxley also mentioned that, during a recent 

 visit to Oxford, Professor Phillips had called his attention 

 to the fine collection of megalosaurian remains in the Museum 

 of Geology, and they had concluded after careful examination 

 that some of the bones of Megalosaurus had hitherto been 

 wrongly determined, the so-called coracoid being the ilium 

 and the clavicle probably the ischium. Since his return to 

 London he had found that similar errors had been made in 

 the interpretation of the bones of Iguanodon and other 



1 The difficulties presented by the quarry at Cutties' Hillock have now 

 been cleared up (J. W. Judd, Proc. Roy. Soc. 1885, p. 394). Of two sand- 

 stones, lithologically almost indistinguishable, the upper contains Hypero- 

 dapedon, with other Triassic vertebrates, the lower well-known Old Red 

 Sandstone fish remains, so that an almost inconspicuous unconformity 

 is the sole record of a great break in time. 



