HKB
miles of the Falunian type, near Dinan, yet found that both assemblages of fossils retained their distinctive characters, showing no signs of any blending of species or transition of climate.
The principal grounds, however, for referring the English Crag to the older Pliocene and the French faluns to the Upper Miocene epochs, consist in the predominance of fossil shells in the British strata identifiable with species not only still living, but which are now inhabitants of neighbouring seas, while the accompanying extinct species are of genera such as characterise Europe. In the faluns, on the contrary, the recent species are in a decided minority; and most of them are now inhabitants of the Mediterranean, the coast of Africa, and the Indian Ocean; in a word, less northern in character, and pointing to the prevalence of a warmer climate. They indicate a state of things receding farther from the present condition of Central Europe in physical geography and climate, and doubtless, therefore, receding farther from our era in time.
Fig. 137: Voluta Lamberti. Among the conspicuous fossils common to the faluns of the Loire and the Suffolk Crag is a variety of the Voluta Lamberti, a shell already alluded to (Fig. 123). The specimens of this shell which I have myself collected in Touraine, or have seen in museums, are thicker and heavier than British individuals of the same species, and shorter in proportion to their width, and have the folds on the columella less oblique, as represented in Fig. 137.
Upper Miocene of Bordeaux and the South of France.—A great extent of country between the Pyrenees and the Gironde is overspread by tertiary deposits of various ages, and chiefly of Miocene date. Some of these, near Bordeaux, coincide in age with the faluns of Touraine, already mentioned, but many of the species of shells are peculiar to the south. The succession of beds in the basin of the Gironde implies several oscillations of level by which the same wide area was alternately converted into sea and land and into brackish-water lagoons, and finally into fresh-water ponds and lakes.
Among the fresh-water strata of this age near the base of the Pyrenees are marls, limestones and sands, in which the eminent comparative anatomist, M. Lartet, has obtained a great number of fossil mammalia common to the faluns of the Loire and the Upper Miocene beds of Switzerland, such as Dinotherium giganteum and Mastodon angustidens; also the bones of quadrumana, or of the ape and monkey tribe, which were discovered in 1837, the first of that order of quadrupeds detected in Europe. They were found near Auch, in the Department of Gers, in latitude 43° 39′ N. About forty miles west of Toulouse. They were referred by MM. Lartet and Blainville to a genus closely allied to the Gibbon, to which they gave the name of Pliopithecus. Subsequently, in 1856, M. Lartet described another species of the same family of long-armed apes (Hylobates), which he obtained from strata of the same age at Saint-Gaudens, in the Haute Garonne. The fossil remains of this animal consisted of a portion of a lower jaw with teeth and the shaft of a humerus. It is supposed to have been a tree-climbing frugivorous ape, equalling man in stature. As the trunks of oaks are common in the lignite beds in which it lay, it has received the generic name of Dryopithecus. The angle formed by the ascending ramus of the jaw and the alveolar border is less open, and therefore more like the human subject, than in the Chimpanzee, and what is still more remarkable, the fossil, a young but adult individual, had all its milk teeth replaced by the second set, while its last true molar (or wisdom-tooth) was still undeveloped, or only existed as a germ in the jaw-bone. In the mode, therefore, of the succession of its teeth (which, as in all the old-World apes, exactly agree in number with those in man) it differed from the Gorilla and Chimpanzee, and corresponded with the human species.