Professor Buckland on the Megalosaurus. 393 



The whole of these remains are found in a bed of calcareous, sandy slate, 

 the greatest thickness of which does not exceed 6 feet, and which lies in the 

 upper part of the third, or lowest division of the oolitic rocks ; being nearly 

 connected with the forest marble, and interposed between the superstratum 

 of cornbrash and substratum of the great oolite of Bath. Its place among the 

 continental equivalent formations, is between the central and lowest strata of 

 the Jura limestone. 



In working the quarries at Stonesfield, they descend by vertical shafts 

 through a solid rock of cornbrash and stratified clay, more than 40 feet thick, 

 to the slaty stratum containing these remains *: it is important to notice this cir- 

 cumstance, because it has been supposed by many persons who have never 

 visited the quarries, that the remains are lodged either in fissures and cavities, or 

 in a superficial and merely local deposit. This is decidedly not the case. They 

 are absolutely imbedded in a deeply-situated regular stratum of the rock itself, 

 which is known to extend across England, from Coly-Weston near Stamford in 

 Lincolnshire, to Hinton near Bath, and is in many places extensively quarried 

 for coarse oolitic slate used for covering houses. Many of these quarries 

 abound in marine and vegetable remains ; but the megalosaurus, opossum, 

 birds, and coleopterous insects, have, I believe, as yet been observed in it 

 only at Stonesfield. 



Mr. Mantell possesses, in his rich and highly valuable collection at Lewes, 

 a small vertebra of megalosaurus, which he purchased in London, having 

 a label on it denoting that it came from Bath ; its matrix appears to be the 

 Bath oolite. In the Oxford Museum there is a rib of this animal, labelled 

 Stonesfield, and imbedded also in a mass of Bath oolite or cornbrash. The 

 cornbrash and Bath oolite are the beds, the former immediately above, the 

 latter immediately below, the Stonesfield slate. As the megalosaurus occurs 

 also in the ferruginous sand of Tilgate Forest, it is clear that the range of this 

 animal extends downwards from this formation to the Bath oolite, and it is 

 probable that its bones will hereafter be found in all the intermediate forma- 

 tions. It has never yet been noticed in chalk. It is totally distinct from the 

 gigantic monitor of Maestricht, of which Mr. Mantell has also discovered some 

 vertebrae in the chalk near Lewes, and at Steyning, being, I believe, the only 

 traces of this animal yet noticed in England. 



It appears from the collection of Mr. Mantell, that the bones of megalosaurus 

 are not less abundant in the ferruginous sand near Cuckfield in Sussex, than 

 they are in the oolitic slate near Oxford. He has numerous bones of many indi- 

 viduals of various sizes and ages ; most of them broken, and some rolled, as at 

 Stonesfield, to the state of pebbles. He has also many small teeth of this animal. 



3e2 



