PALEONTOLOGY 



Essex Pleistocene, this being the wild swan (Cygnus musicus), of which 

 the British Museum possesses a leg-bone from Grays. 



A few fish remains have been obtained from the brickearths of 

 Essex, mainly from Grays, and have been provisionally assigned to the 

 following species, 1 viz. the pike (Esox lucius), ruff (Acerina vu/garis), 

 roach (Leuciscus rutilus), dace (L. dobula), rudd (L. erythophthalmus) t 

 and eel (Anguilla vu/garis). With the exception of the first, which also 

 occurs at Copford and Ilford, all these forms are known from the 

 deposits at Grays. 



Mammalian remains from the Red Crag at Walton and other 

 localities where the same formation occurs in the county appear to be 

 exceedingly rare. Fragments of the tusks of the Crag walrus (Odobanus 

 huxleyi) are however recorded from Essex. 



At the time when the ' cement stones,' or septaria, of the London 

 Clay were collected in the neighbourhood of Harwich, these when 

 broken were occasionally found to be formed round part of a mammalian 

 skeleton or the shell or skull of a turtle. In the winter of 1856-7 a 

 portion of such a nodule containing bones, which had been obtained 

 near Harwich, was brought to Sir R. Owen, who described the skull 

 and other remains found therein as those of a new genus of mammal, 

 under the name of Pliolophus vulpiceps. Subsequently however they 

 were identified by Sir W. H. Flower with a mammal previously 

 described by Owen from the London Clay of Kent as Hyracotberium 

 leporinum. The animal in question, which was about the size of a fox ; 

 was one of the ancestral types of the horse. The Essex specimen is in 

 the British Museum. 



Of even greater interest is a fragment of the lower jaw of a much 

 larger mammal in the same collection containing two teeth, which was 

 dredged off the Essex coast between St. Osyth and Harwich some time 

 previous to the year 1846, and appears to have been derived from the 

 London Clay. This specimen is described and figured in Owen's British 

 Fossil Mammals and Birds under the name of Coryphodon eoceenus, and 

 forms the type of both the genus and the species. For many years the 

 affinities of the Coryphodon were unknown, but from the evidence of 

 complete skeletons obtained in North America it is now ascertained to 

 have been a large hoofed mammal of very primitive type allied to the 

 wonderful horned Uintatherium of the North American Eocene. 



Skulls and shells of large marine turtles belonging to the extinct 

 genus Lytoloma are not uncommon in these Harwich cement stones, and 

 there is a considerable series of such specimens in the British Museum. 

 Some of these remains belong to L. crassicostatum, of which the type 

 specimen is from Harwich, and was originally described by Sir R. Owen 

 as Chelone crassicostata. The second species, originally described by the 

 same palaeontologist on the evidence of a skull from Harwich, is L. 

 planimentum. 



From the Chalk of Essex remains belonging to those gigantic 



1 See E. T. Newton, Geol. Mag. Dec. 4, viii. 51 (1901). 

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