312 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 425. 



have been explored and thousands of the bones 

 of other animals recovered. It is quite pos- 

 sible that the great auk may have straggled so 

 far south during severe v^inters, since there 

 is some reason to believe that it was not rare 

 oft' the coast of Virginia, but that it was a 

 resident anywhere south of Nova Scotia is 

 open to doubt, and that it bred even there is 

 open to argument. Mr. McGuire tells me that 

 foreign vessels traded along the eastern coast 

 of North America to a much greater extent 

 than is generally known, and as the great auk 

 was frequently salted down for ships' stores, 

 it may well have been carried south in this 

 form, and found its way to an Indian village. 

 As bearing on the value of the evidence of 

 stray bones found in shell heaps, it is to be 

 noted that the same part of the heap in which 

 the bones of the great auk were found yielded 

 a himierus of a typical dachshund. (My an- 

 thropological friends will cheerfully correct 

 me if I err in saying that this breed of dogs 

 was unknown on the American continent in 

 prehistoric times.) Are we then to at once 

 conclude that the dachshund was common 

 among the Indians? F. A. Lucas. 



Washington, D. C. 



RECENT ZOOPALEONTOLOGY. 



AN UPPER PLIOCENE CAVE. 



Professor Boyd Dawkins recently (January 

 7, 1903) described, before the Geological So- 

 ciety of London, an Upper Pliocene Cave dis- 

 covered in 1901. This cave is of far greater 

 antiquity than the familiar caves of the Pleis- 

 tocene and contains a mammalian fauna 

 including the mastodon, elephant, rhinoceros, 

 horse and saber-toothed tiger in an Upper 

 Pliocene stage of evolution, similar to that of 

 the Val d'Arno of Italy. In course of the ab- 

 stract he says : 



" Some of the bones present the character- 

 istic teeth-marks of the hyenas ; and the pre- 

 ponderance of the remains of the young over 

 the adult mastodons points to the selection by 

 the hyenas, who could easily master the calves, 

 while they did not as a rule attack the large 

 and formidable adults. The author has ob- 

 served a similar selection in the case of mam- 



moths in hyena-dens, into which the remains 

 had been brought by those cave-haunting ani- 

 mals." At the same time the author presented 

 a map illustrating the physical geography of 

 the British Isles in the Upper Pliocene Age. 



A NEW RHINOCEROS FROM SOUTHERN BAVARL4.. 



Dr. Ernst Stromer, working in the Paleon- 

 tological Museum of Munich, has recently de- 

 scribed* a new rhinoceros, Aceraiherium hava- 

 ricum, from the Upper Miocene of Bavaria. 

 The skull is of similar type to the well-known 

 Aceratherium, tetradactylum of Sansan, and 

 the A. incisivum of the Lower Pliocene of 

 Eppelsheim. Unfortunately the tip of the 

 nasals is lacking, a fact which renders it diffi- 

 cult to determine to which series of rhinoce- 

 roses this animal belongs. (2) The same 

 author gives a valuable summary of the geo- 

 logical history of northern Africa.f (3) He 

 has also published a comparative paper upon 

 the entepicondylar foramen and third tro- 

 chanter,:}: primitive characters of the fore and 

 hind limbs of mammals. (4) A more exten-» 

 sive work is his memoir entitled ' Die Wirbel 

 der Land-Raubtiere,' based principally upon 

 the extensive collections in the Museum of 

 Munich and worked out at the suggestion of 

 Dr. Max Schlosser. 



the BASAL EOCENE MAMMALIAN FAUNA IN THE 

 FT. UNION BEDS OF MONTANA. 



The very important discovery of bones and 

 teeth of mammals in the Ft. Union beds of 

 Montana has been reported by Earl Douglass 

 of the Carnegie Museum, in a paper entitled 

 ' A Cretaceous and Lower Tertiary Section 



* ' Ein Aceratherium-Sohadel aus dem Dino- 

 therien-Sand von Niederbayern,' Abdr. a. d. 

 O-eognosiichen Jahresheften, 1902. 15. Jahrgang, 

 1902. 



t ' Betraehtungen fiber die geologische Ge- 

 sehichte Aethiopiens,' Abdr. a. d. Zeitschr. d. 

 Deutsch. geolog. Gessellschaft, Jahrg., 1901. 



t ' Ueber die Bedeutung des Foramen entepicon- 

 dyloideum und des Trochanter tertius der Sauge- 

 thiere,' Sep. Abdr. Morphologisches Jahrbuch, 

 XXIX., 4. 



