430 



The yellow clay is found in many other branches of this valley, and fos- 

 sils are met with there very frequently. 



In the year 1800, M. Tourtelle, of Fouvent-le-Prieure, a little village 

 near Gray, in the department of Upper Saone, excavating a limestone 

 rock, to extend his garden, found, in a fissure of the rock, various un- 

 common bones of different shapes and sizes. The excavations being 

 increased, several more bones were found, and transmitted to the Na- 

 tional Museum. These bones were chiefly of the jaws of elephants and 

 of horses; but, amongst them, M. Cuvier also found a fragment of the 

 lower jaw of the left side of a hyena, containing four grinders; a muti- 

 lated canine tooth, and the inferior part of a humerus, well preserved. 



M. Cuvier, from the accurate knowledge which he possesses in com- 

 parative anatomy, has been enabled to discover that the fossil hyena is 

 of a different species from the common one of the Levant. The last 

 molar tooth of the lower jaw, in the known hyena, is distinguished by a 

 strongly marked conical point on the anterior inner angle, and which 

 projects inwards towards the palate: but, in the fossil corresponding 

 tooth, this projection does not exist. 



M. Cuvier was enabled to determine the fragment of a lower jaw, with 

 the four molar teeth, to belong to the genus Hyena ; but he was also 

 led to believe it to belong to a different species from the common hyena, 

 from the three anterior teeth possessing a less longitudinal extent, in pro- 

 portion to their width and height, than is observable in those of the 

 common hyena, and from their lateral points being less developed, and 

 particularly the anterior one, which was entirely wanting in the second 

 tooth ; although it is very distinct in the common hyena. Calculating 

 from the size of some fossil teeth, both from Canstadt and Fouvent, 

 M. Cuvier concludes, that the animal to which they belonged must have 

 exceeded the size of the common hyena one fifth. 



In a fragment of the upper jaw, from Gaylenreuth, he found the third 

 molar tooth, which, though decidedly of the hyena, was analogous with 

 the fossil teeth of the preceding lower jaw, in being short from front to 

 back, in proportion to its height and transverse diameter. Its anterior 

 tubercle was entirely wanting, and its posterior hardly perceptible. 



