- A -MARINE EARLY CRETACEOUS FAUNA. 11 
lacustrine beds, chiefly sandstones, in which Valanginian ( ?) beds with 
the lotrigonia fauna are a transient marine phase. Then follow marine 
Aptian sediments and then, after an interval, marine Upper Albian. The 
possibility of a marine Hauterivian incursion in Queensland raises the 
question whether other transient Neocomian marine phases may be 
present. 
Such is the similarity of succession. There is also a similarity of 
faunas. The faunal agreement throughout this province of the first 
marine phase has been noted. Although the relationships are most 
marked with India and Africa, representatives of this limited Trigonia 
assembly are known in the N.W. Himalayas, Kachh, Coconda (east coast 
of India), Madagascar, Tanganyika, Zululand, South Africa, as well as 
in Patagonia, Chile, Bolivia and Texas. The similarity continues. Little 
is known at present of the Aptian faunas of Africa and India; but 
records from Zululand by Rennie (1936) of Toxoceratoides, 
Australiceras, T'ropaeum arctiou\m , etc., suggest that there may be a 
close comparison with the Aptian beds (Roma Series) of Queensland. 
In the Upper Albian the faunal similarities between East Africa 
and Eastern Australia are particularly marked, as Spath (1925) and I 
(Whitehouse, 1926) have shown. Several of the ammonite genera are 
common to those regions and are known nowhere else. 
As a further link, reference may be made again to the belemnite 
family Dimitobelidae (Whitehouse, 1924) which is restricted to the 
Indo-Pacific region (India, Australia and New Zealand), and to the 
genus Maccoyella (chiefly Aptian), restricted, so far as is known, to 
India, Australia, New Zealand and Patagonia. 
Pacific relationships remain intimate in the Upper Cretaceous, as 
Wilckens frequently has stressed (see, e.g., 1922, p. 31), but now they 
are more evident in the eastern Pacific region. No Upper Cretaceous 
marine beds occur in Queensland. 
In these things this zone differs from the East Indies province. 
There, for instance, Valanginian beds are known (in Borneo and 
Sumatra) but they are of foraminiferal facies and have not yielded 
the lotrigonia fauna. Later Cretaceous faunas of the Indies also are 
markedly different in facies — e.g., Albian deposits have pseudoceratitic 
ammonites. 
FOSSIL PLANTS. 
This is not the occasion to review in detail the palaeobotanical 
evidence of the Lower Cretaceous of Queensland; but a few aspects 
should be noted. 
The typical early Mesozoic gymnosperm flora, with Taeniopteris, 
Ginkgoites , Cladophlebis, Thinnfeldia , etc., begins in Gondwanaland 
in the Permian. These four “genera/ ’ for instance, occur in the 
Permian of Queensland. Throughout the whole of the Triassic period 
the flora flourished and reached its local acme. It declined markedly 
in the Jurassic of Queensland where only occasionally is there a flora 
rich in species. 
This flora was not well established in Europe until late, in the 
Triassic — which accounts for so many of the Queensland Triassic floras 
having been placed erroneously as Rhaetic from European comparisons. 
