26 ANNALS OF THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, No. 6 
FOSSIL VERTEBRATES FROM NEWJ3HJINEA. 
It is but rarely that we have opportunities of studying vertebrate 
fossils from New Guinea. It was therefore with eager acceptance 
that relics of the kind were received from the late Government 
Geologist, Mr. W. H. Rands, F.G.S., who had himself received 
them from Captain Barton, then Private Secretary to his Excellency 
the Lieutenant-Governor of British New Guinea. These fossils, 
which may possibly enable one to contribute a little to the slowly 
accumulating palaeontology of the Possession, are from Busai in 
Murua, an island otherwise known as Woodlark Island. Captain 
Barton, to whose acumen we owe the rescue of the fossils from 
destruction, informs us that Busai, a place-word not found on our 
maps, is the name of the southern part of the western half of the 
island, that nearly the whole of this western moiety is a coral 
covered plain densely clothed with vegetation, and that the island 
is on the south girt about with a fringing reef and defended by an 
outwork of barrier reef. The spot where the bones were exhumed 
he considers to be within the area of an old river bed. Immediately 
before his first visit to it, one of the miners who were successfully 
prospecting for gold in the alluvial of the tract, had in the course 
of his work thrown some of the fossils out of his shaft on to the 
mullock heap alongside. Fortunately, they were there noticed 
by Captain Barton, who at once appropriated them, and persuaded 
the miner to put aside any others he might disinter. On his return 
to Busai long afterwards he found that the promise had been kept, 
and that he was able to bring away other remains which have 
proved more instructive. 
The living evidence given by Tree-kangaroos and Cassowaries 
that there was once an overland route by which beast and bird 
could pass between Australia and New Guinea, and the supporting 
testimony afforded by certain Australian fossils, have naturally 
begotten an expectation that sooner or later some characteristic 
member of the land or fresh water fauna, now extinct in Australia, 
would be forthcoming from the strata of the more northern island. 
It was therefore with a lively hope of meeting an old friend or two 
amongst these bones that the invitation to identify them if possible 
was accepted. The hope was premature. The native haunt 
of all the four or five animals represented by them was unmis- 
takeably marine ; the age of them in consequence not determinable 
by means of any instance of synchronism with the great Australian 
marsupials or their contemporaries, or, in the absence of strati- 
graphical data, definable by any term less vague than Quarternary or 
Tertiary. Whatever the age of this alluvium may be, and whatever 
the changes of level experienced by its bedrock, it is evident that 
at the present time it lies, as Captain Burton says, but little above 
high water mark. The bones were, in some instances encrusted 
with calcareous mud, in others the cavities were filled with sand, 
pebbles, and ferruginous concretions, mud and grit alike containing 
