GEOLOGY. 



27 



SOUTH-EAST GALLERY. 



Vertebrate Animals.* 



CLASS 1 . — MAMMALIA. 



The Cases in the South-East Gallery are devoted to the exhibition 

 of the Fossil remains of Animals of the class Mammalia,! the great 

 proportion of which are only met with in the newer Tertiary 

 and Quaternary deposits, forming the most superficial part of the 

 earth's crust. The earlier traces of such higher class of animals 

 are extremely rare, being met with in those rocks known to geolo- 

 gists as the Eocene formation ; — a very few remains of almost the 

 lowest class — the Marsupialia — extremely small in size, occurring 

 in rocks of Secondary age.j (See Table-case No. 15 in the Pavilion.) 



Many of these animals are quite extinct, but a very large number 

 belong to forms closely related to the existing terrestrial orders — 

 such as the cat-tribe (lion and tiger), the dog, the wolf, the seal, the 

 bear, and hyaena ; the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, pig, horse, camel, 

 giraffe, elephant, deer, oxen, sheep ; the beaver, marmot, hare, 

 whales, &c. 



The deposits which have yielded the largest proportion of these 

 remains are met with in caves and fissures in limestone rocks, old 

 lake and river valley- basins, filled up with gravels, sands, loess, and 

 brick-earth ; clays, shell-marls, and peat-deposits ; ancient forest-beds, 

 which have been covered up and submerged; and delta deposits 

 formed in the estuaries of great rivers, such as the Thames, the 

 Severn, the Rhine, the Nile, the Ganges, the Mississippi, the 

 Amazons, and La Plata. The frozen soil of the great alluvial plains 

 bordering the Arctic sea both in the Old and New World are rich 

 in remains of large herbivorous animals, such as the " Mammoth" 

 and the " Woolly Rhinoceros," that once inhabited these high 

 northern latitudes before the climate became too cold for the growth 

 of forest-trees. 



All over the world caves are to be met with in limestone rocks. 

 Examples of the animal remains found in some of these may be 

 seen in Wall-case No. 1 and Table-case No. 1 (South side). As 

 these caves have frequently served in prehistoric times as habitations 

 for Primitive Man, when he subsisted by hunting and fishing, wc 



* In this great division of the Animal Kingdom is included all animals which 

 possess a backbone. 



T Animals that suckle their young ; in this class is included man, and all the 

 higher animals. 



+ Microlestes Moorei, Owen (represented by teeth only), from the Rbsetic beds of 

 Somerset, and M. antiquus from the Trias of Germany. Dromatkerium, from North 

 America. Other species (small but more numerous), from the Stonesfield and Pur- 

 beck beds of England and America. 



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