PALAEONTOLOGY 



WITH the exception of a very few obtained from the superficial 

 deposits, the vertebrate fossils of Staffordshire seem to be 

 restricted to the horizons of the Trias and the Coal 

 Measures. Although the Coal Measure vertebrates are 

 by far the more numerous, those from the Trias are, as a whole, much 

 the more interesting, on account of the rarity, at least in this country, of 

 the types to which they belong. An exception in this respect must, 

 however, be made in the case of the shark-remains from the Coal 

 Measures belonging to the genus Edestus, of which they are the only 

 known British representatives. 



Of mammalian remains from the Pleistocene formations of the 

 county a list has been drawn up by Mr. John Ward of Longton, and 

 published in the Transactions of the North Staffordshire Field Club for 

 igoa. 1 The earliest record dates back to 1688, when Robert Plot, 

 in his Natural History of Staffordshire p , relates that a jaw and a tooth 

 of a young elephant doubtless the mammoth (Elephas primigenius] 

 were found in a marl-pit near Trentham. Probably it is these speci- 

 mens which are referred to on page 258 of Owen's British Fossil 

 Mammals and Birds, as having come under the observation of Dean 

 Buckland. Be this as it may, Robert Garner, in his Natural History of 

 the County of Stafford (1844), refers to the occurrence at Trentham and 

 other places in the county, both in diluvial gravel, and also in the clay at 

 the bottom of certain caves, of the bones of the red deer (Cervus elaphus), 

 roe-buck (Capreolus capreolus), rhinoceros, elephant, and hyaena. The 

 rhinoceros was doubtless the woolly Siberian Rhinoceros antiquitatis, while 

 the elephant was probably the mammoth, and the hyaena the large cave 

 race (Hyaena crocuta spelaea] of the existing South African spotted 

 species. 



Parkinson, in his Organic Remains, figured a mammoth's molar from 

 Staffordshire, which figure is reproduced on page 239 of Owen's work 

 already cited; and in 1864 Mr. J. Plant* exhibited before the Man- 

 chester Geological Society a series of the teeth and bones of the 

 mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the Pleistocene race of the 

 hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius major) which had been found in 

 the county. 



1 Vol. xxxvi, 90. * Trans. Manchester Geol. Sue. v, 42. 



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