Ch. XXIL] FOSSIL FOOTSTEPS IX NEW RED SANDSTONE. 



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a thickness of 600 feet in the counties last mentioned. Besides red and 

 green shales and red sandstones, it comprises much soft white quartzose 

 sandstone, in which the trunks of silicified trees have been met with at 

 Allesley Hill, near Coventry. Several of them were a foot and a half in 

 diameter, and some yards in length, decidedly of coniferous wood, and 

 showing rings of annual growth.'* Impressions, also, of the footsteps of 

 animals have been detected in Lancashire and Cheshire in this formation. 

 Some of the most remarkable occur a few miles from Liverpool, in the 

 whitish quartzose sandstone of Storton Hill, on the west side of the Mersey. 

 They bear a close resemblance to tracks first observed in a member of the 

 Upper New Red Sandstone, at the village of Hesseberg, near Hiklburg- 

 hausen, in Saxony, to which I have already al- 

 luded. For many years these footprints have 

 been referred to a large unknown quadruped, 

 provisionally named Cheirotherium by Professor 

 Kaup, because the marks both of the fore and 

 hind feet resembled impressions made by a hu- 

 man hand. (See fig. 435.) The footmarks at 

 Hesseberg are partly concave and partly in re- 

 lief; the former, or the depressions, are seen 

 upon the upper surface of the sandstone slabs, 

 but those in relief are only upon the lower sur- 

 faces, being in fact natural casts, formed in the 

 subjacent footprints as in moulds. The larger 

 impressions, which seem to be those of the hind foot, are generally 8 

 inches in length, and 5 in width, and one was 12 inches long. Near 

 each large footstep, and at a regular distance (about an inch and a half), 



Single footstep of Cheirothe- 

 rium. Bunter Sandstein, 

 Saxony ; one-eighth of nat. 

 size. 



Line of footsteps on slab of sandstone. Hildburghausen, in Saxony. 



before it, a smaller print of a fore foot, 4 inches long and 3 inches wide, 

 occurs. The footsteps follow each other in pairs, each pair in the same 

 line, at intervals of 14 inches from pair to pair. The large as well as the 

 small steps show the great toes alternately on the right and left side ; 

 each step makes the print of five toes, the first or great toe being bent 

 inwards like a thumb. Though the fore and hind foot differ so much in 

 size, they are nearly similar in form. 



The similar footmarks afterwards observed in a rock of corresponding age 

 at Storton Hill, were imprinted on five thin beds of clay, superimposed one 

 upon the other in the same quarry, and separated by beds of sandstone. 

 On the lower surface of the sandstone strata, the solid casts of each impres- 



* Buckland, Proc. Geol. Soc. voL ii. 

 Geol. Trans. Second Ser. vol. v. p. 347. 



p. 439 ; and Murchison and Strickland, 



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