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the skull, jaws, and horns of some creature. They got out 
some of the teeth, horn cores, and other bones, when the soil 
above them fell into the sand pit in which they were digging, 
and the remaining bones were again buried. 
The bones and teeth taken out of the pit, and which I now 
produce, have undergone disintegration from exposure to the 
atmosphere. That the animal to which these hones belonged 
fed upon herbage such as Pontefract Park might once grow, 
I think the teeth confirm. That it was an animal somewhat 
smaller than the present race of oxen, the Humerus and 
Scapula indicate. That it was a short-horned animal the 
horn cores sufficiently testify. Although the skull, jaw, and 
ribs are wanting, Professor Owen, who has examined these 
bones, identifies them as the bones of the Bos Longifrons, 
Long-Fronted or Small Fossil Ox. 
No whole skeleton of this animal has ever been found — its 
bones have been dug up with those of the Reindeer, the Bos 
Priscus and the Bos Primigenius , and with Roman antiquities ; 
from which it is inferred that this fossil species continued to 
exist after every other Pliocene Mammal had died out. It 
was but the other day that the thigh-bone of one of the extinct 
species of deer which existed in this country in pre- glacial 
times was found in a crevice of limestone at South Elmsall, 
and I found another at Monkhill, near the Bos Longifrons. 
There is evidence, then, that the Bos Priscus, Bos Primigenius , 
and the Bos Longifrons , whose fossil histories date from the 
time of the Mammoth, continued to exist in this island not 
only after it became inhabited by man but after it was 
conquered by the Romans. Perhaps this small short-horned 
newer Pliocene ox is still preserved in the mountain varieties 
of our domestic cattle ; if so, the Bos Longifrons forms the 
connecting link between man’s appearance with the present 
race of domesticated animals, and the wonderful changes 
which have taken place in pre-historic Mammalian Fauna, 
