A HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE 



In 1864 Mr. Brockbank 8 recorded from a fissure in the Carboni- 

 ferous Limestone at Bank End Quarry, Waterhouses, on the bank of the 

 River Hamps, numerous remains of the mammoth, and it has been 

 subsequently stated * that the collection obtained by Plant came from 

 this spot. 



Mr. Ward records the extinct wild ox, or aurochs (Bos taurus 

 prim/genius), from a bed near Etruria station, where a fine skull was 

 found in 1877, and also a mammoth-tusk from Fenton. The aurochs 

 and the domesticated Celtic shorthorn (the so-called Bos longifrons] are 

 also recorded from Stone. 



The first evidence of vertebrate life recorded from the Keuper, or 

 Upper Division of the Trias (New Red Sandstone), was in the form of casts 

 of footsteps. These have been observed in quarries at Hollington and 

 Alton * in North Staffordshire, in the building-stones of the Lower 

 Keuper ; while others have been recorded from South Staffordshire 

 along the outcrop of the harder beds of the Keuper a few miles north- 

 west of Wolverhampton.' Yet others have been described from Stanton, 

 two and a half miles from Burton-on-Trent, and also from Coven, near 

 Brewood, in the southern division of the county. 7 These latter have 

 been provisionally assigned to the rhynchocephalian reptile Rhynchosaurus, 

 a forerunner of the living New Zealand tuatera (Spbenodon) t of which 

 remains are recorded from the Keuper of Grinshill in Shropshire. Of 

 those from the first-named localities some, at any rate, are, however, 

 referable to Cbirosaurus (or Cbirotberiuni), creatures definitely known 

 only by footprints of this type, but which have been generally regarded 

 as large primeval salamanders, or labyrinthodont amphibians. 



This view is to some extent supported by the discovery in the 

 Staffordshire Keuper of the skull of an undoubted labyrinthodont 

 of considerable size, although not perhaps sufficiently large to have 

 made footsteps of the biggest size known. This skull, which exhibits 

 chiefly a cast of the inside of the upper surface, was discovered in 

 a quarry at Stanton, about three miles from Norbury, in the building- 

 stone of the Keuper. It was first described and figured by the late 

 Mr. John Ward in the Transactions of the North Staffordshire Field 

 Club for 1900,' where it is referred to the genus Dasycefs, typically 

 from the Permian of Kenilworth ; but it has been again described and 

 figured by Dr. A. Smith Woodward in the Proceedings of the Zoological 

 Society of London for 1904,' under the name of Capitosaurus stantonensis. 

 The genus to which the Stanton labyrinthodont is now referred occurs 

 typically in the Keuper of Wiirtemberg. 



Some of the Keuper footprints may, on the other hand, have 

 belonged to rhynchocephalian reptiles, of the occurrence of which in this 

 formation decisive evidence has been recently obtained. This evidence 



Proc. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. (1864), 46. ' Aitkin, Trans. Manchester Geol. Soc. xii, 25. 



H. C. Beasley, Proc. Liverpool Geol. Soc. 



J. Lomas, Rep. Brit. Assoc. for 1903, p. 5 ; and Beeby Thompson, Geol. Mag. (4), ix, (1902). 



Lydekker, Cat. Foss. Rept. Brit. Mus. iv, 2 1 9. 



Vol. xxxiv, 1 08, pis. iv, v. 9 Vol. ii, 171, pis. xi, xii. 



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