xi. CETEOSAURUS. 247 



Hill, near Wotton, three miles north-west of Woodstock, is another 

 locality for remains of ceteosaurus, quoted by Owen ; and to this I 

 may add the neighbouring village of Glympton, from whence 

 vertebrae were sent by Mr. Barnett to the Oxford Museum. 



We may safely conclude that all the places indicated (excluding 

 Thame) belong to the area of the Great oolite rocks, the same, in 

 fact, as those which have yielded the greater series next to be 

 noticed. 



We now come to the locality which has proved the richest of 

 all yet examined for bones of ceteosaurus the quarries at Gibraltar, 

 near Enslow Bridge, and close to the railway station for Kirtlington 

 and Bletchingdon, eight miles north of Oxford. The quarries at 

 this place have been wrought for common building and road- 

 making and lime-burning from ancient time; and a considerable 

 number of bones of teleosaurus, a few of megalosaurus, and plenty 

 of teeth of other reptiles and of fishes have been obtained by the 

 workmen. But there is no record of any very large bones being 

 disinterred till the railway-cutting was made there, which gave 

 so much information of the succession of strata immediately below 

 the cornbrash (p. 154). It was then that the attention of Mr. 

 Hugh E. Strickland, M.A., of Merton College, was drawn to the 

 locality, and was rewarded by a great discovery. 



The workmen took up the thigh-bone of an unknown lizard, 

 fifty-one inches long, entire in the ground, but compressed and 

 shattered, so that a hundred fragments required careful readjust- 

 ment. This being accomplished, the whole well cemented, and 

 bound round with wire, the bone resumed its original aspect, and 

 was long the object of admiration in the Oxford class-room for 

 geology k . Here it was examined by Man tell and Owen, and by 

 the latter was adopted as a species of ceteosaurus, and allied to the 

 vertebrae which had about twenty years before been brought from 

 near Chipping-Norton. A smaller bone which accompanied it has 

 usually been regarded as a fibula, but in that case it must have 

 belonged to an animal only half as large. 



Twenty years later, in the beginning of 1868, the welcome, but 

 very unexpected news reached me of the finding of another bone, 

 described as being of the size of an ordinary Oxonian ; and no time 

 was lost in arranging for its preservation. It was found to be 



k Proc. of the Ashmolean Society, Oxford*. 1848. 



