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and other othiiologica made hv Colonel Alexander V. KaznakofT, to- 

 gether with several hundred volumes of scientific works in many 

 languages. Colonel KaznakofT, who was formerly Director of the Mu- 

 seum at Tiflis, has presented all this material to the Museum. 



Dr. Marjorie O'Connell is continuing her work on the collection of 

 Jurassic ammonites made in Cuba in 1918 and 1919by Barnum Brown. 

 The material consists of a fauna most of the species of which have not 

 been found before in the western hemisphere, and some of which are new 

 to science. They are species similar to or identical with forms found in 

 France and Germany. Their discovery in Cuba makes it possible to 

 define more clearly the shore lines of the Jurassic ocean — the more ex- 

 panded Atlantic Ocean of that time, an ocean which covered the .site of 

 the present loftiest mountains of Europe — the Caucasus, Alps, Jura and 

 Pyrenees — and spread over all the Mediterranean countries, having 

 extensions into western Russia, southern Germany, France and eastern 

 England, while in the western hemisphere its shores are found in Mexico 

 and Cuba. 



Ammonites were the dominant marine invertebrates of the Mesozoic 

 era, as the reptiles were the dominant form of life among the verte- 

 brates. A few ammonites had been collected by a Cuban in 1910, but 

 had not been described, nor was their exact age known. In 1918 and 

 1919, iMr. Brown made extensive collections in the Province of Pinar 

 del Rio, traversing the mountains in seven different places. From those 

 collections it has been possible to determine a succession of faunal zones 

 for the Middle and Upper Jurassic which is the same as that found in the 

 Jura Mountains and elsewhere in Europe. Some fifteen million years of 

 organic evolution are represented in the ammonites collected. Biologi- 

 cally the specimens are interesting because they throw new light on the 

 broader problems of organic evolution and the laws which control it. 

 Geologically the collection is valuable because it marks the only occur- 

 rence of rocks of Jurassic age in the West Indies and makes possible the 

 establishment of a geological column of rock formations which can be 

 compared with those of Mexico and Europe. By combining the 

 palaeontological and geological data, a palaeogeographic map can be 

 constructed showing the extent of the ancient lands and the boundaries 

 of the shorelines of the oceans. Through the study ot the fossils, the 

 rocks can be correlated with those of the same age from Europe, Asia 



