THE BRITISH OR LIGHT-TAILED SQUIRREL 695 



of prey — stoats, martens, and perhaps wild cats — must have gathered 

 in unusual numbers could have had no small influence. 



The Squirrel is absent from Man (Kermode in Ralfe) and all the 

 Scotch Islands, except Bute, where it is said to have been introduced 

 about 1873 (Harvie-Brown), but is now extinct. 



Distribution in time : — .Notwithstanding the great antiquity of the 

 genus, it appears to have left but few traces of its former existence in 

 the fossiliferous deposits of Britain. Apart from the early Tertiary 

 remains noticed above, our knowledge is limited to the scanty 

 information gleaned from the late pliocene Norfolk " Forest Bed." 

 Heer first noticed that some fossil fir-cones from this deposit appeared 

 to have been gnawed by Squirrels (Lyell, Antiq. of Man, 1863, 

 215). Later, Newton {Vert. For. Bed., 92) ascribed a humerus in the 

 Green collection (British Museum) to 5. vulgaris ; this specimen is 

 reputed to be from the Forest Bed of Ostend, Norfolk, but its age, 

 as Newton pointed out, is quite doubtful, there being a much more 

 recent alluvial deposit in the vicinity from which Green also collected 

 many specimens. Quite recently, however, a premolar has been found 

 in the Forest Bed at West Runton, and this proves the late Pliocene 

 species — S. whitei, Hinton (^Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., January 1914, 

 193) — to have had a more bunodont and primitive dentition than 

 kucourus or vulgaris ; when better known, 5. whitei will very likely 

 prove to belong to a genus distinct from Sciurus in the strict modern 

 sense. No trace at all of the genus has been so far discovered in the 

 British Pleistocene, a fact to be ascribed to its arboreal habits, and 

 the consequent remoteness of the chance of entombment rather than 

 to its absence from our primeval forests. Woldrich has referred 

 some fragments from the late Pleistocene of Zuzlawitz, Bohemia, to 

 5. vulgaris. 



Description: — The British Squirrel is a slenderly built rodent, 

 characterised in life by its peculiarly graceful and elegant appearance. 

 Its neck and limbs, being much less completely invested in the common 

 integument of the trunk, are more obvious externally, and apparently 

 longer than in Muridce. 



The head is moderately large, rounded behind, with a narrow, 

 rather short, but relatively deep rostrum. The muzzle, except at the 

 margins of the nostrils, is hairy ; the median walls of the nostrils are 

 narrowly but deeply separated by an upward continuation of the lip- 

 cleft Besides the whiskers, which are numerous stout, black hairs, of 

 which some surpass the head in length, tactile hairs occur in three 

 positions, viz. (i) above the eyes, where there are two or three long 

 and rather fine black vibrissae ; (2) on each cheek three or four 

 similar black hairs are placed below the eye, on the level of a line 

 drawn from the mouth to the base of the ear ; and (3) on the ventral 



