PSEUDORCA CRASSIDENS. 
195 
up at Kiel, that I became convinced that some few trifling particulars in which the crania may, 
perhaps, differ from each other, are at most only individual differences. 
Thus, as it may be considered as an indisputable fact, that in all the different cases 
mentioned here, we have only to do with one and the same species, the next question will be, 
whether this species has already been described or not; for though it is not one of the dolphins 
generally known in the Northern seas, it does not of course follow that it is an entirely unknown 
form, generally speaking ; nor, as we shall see, is this the case. It is true that it may be sought 
for in vain among the remaining more or less well-known species now in existence; even that 
one among the latter to which it has, perhaps, the greatest resemblance, the Delpldnus feres, 
from the Mediterranean, described by Bonnaterre, 1 but never found again since his time, must, if 
the description is in any way to be trusted, be quite a different animal, though it agrees with ours, 
as far as the length of the body and the number and size of the teeth are concerned. But the 
case is different when we extend our researches to the fossil, or so-called fossil species, for 
among these there is one, viz., Owen’s Phoccena crassidens' (Orca crassidens, Gray), 3 to which 
at all events it has a most striking resemblance, if, indeed, it is not quite identical with 
it. This species is founded on a cranium and some other parts of a skeleton, which some 
twenty years ago were dug up from beneath the layer of turf in the Great Pen in Lincolnshire, 
not far from the town of Stamford. Thus the circumstances under which these remains are 
found do not preclude the possibility of their belonging to a species still living, but hitherto 
unknown, and though their appearance caused the distinguished naturalist, to whom we are 
indebted for our information about them, to suppose that they were fossil, yet he has himself 
alluded to such a possibility, improbable as it might have seemed to him. Owen has 
described nothing but the cranium of his Phoccena crassidens, and his description is not detailed 
enough to admit of any minute comparison between his cranium and ours, being, indeed, 
especially intended to show the difference between the new species and the killer and the 
ca’ing-whale; in one particular, finally, the importance of which we shall examine more 
closely, it may, perhaps, be doubtful whether his description agrees altogether with 
the state of things as we have found them in our dolphin, but on the other hand, the short 
description is, on the whole, very appropriate, and the figures by which it is illustrated (viz., 
two figures of the cranium, 4 and one of the five foremost cervical vertebrae), 6 not only show a 
resemblance to our dolphin in the general outlines, but they present exactly those characters in 
particular by which it is distinguished from all the other more or less kindred forms. I 
therefore, believe, that w r e must really acknowledge this Phoccena crassidens of Owen, to be the 
dolphin stranded on our coasts, however strange it may seem, that our first knowledge of a Cetacean, 
of which great shoals are still, in our time, roaming about in our Northern sea, should have 
come to us through an individual which, thousands of years ago, found its resting place on a sea- 
1 “ Tableau Encyclopedique et Methodique des trois regnes de la Nature,” 1 Cetologie/ par M. 
kAbbe Bonnaterre, Paris, 1789, p. 27. 
2 ‘ A History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds/ London, 184G, p. 516. 
3 ‘The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror/ “Mammalia,” London, 1846, 
p. 34. ‘Catalogue of the Species of Mammalia in the collection of British Museum; part i, Cetacea, 
London, 1850, p. 94. 
* L. c., fig. 213, p. 516 and fig. 216, p. 523. 
5 L. c., fig. 214, p. 520. 
