HKB
accumulated. There were also formations in progress, in shallow seas not far from shore, such as are indicated by portions of the Faluns of the Loire, and the English Crag.
The proximity, therefore, of large tracts of dry land to the seas and lakes then existing, may, in a great measure, explain why the remains of land animals, so rare in the older strata, are not uncommon in these more modern deposits. Yet even these have sometimes proved entirely destitute of mammiferous relics for years after they had become celebrated for the abundance of their fossil testacea, fish, and reptiles. Thus the calcaire grossier, a marine limestone of the district round Paris, had afforded to collectors more than 1100 species of shells, besides many zoophytes, echinodermata, and the teeth of fish, before the bones of one or two land quadrupeds were met with in the same rock. The strata called London and Plastic clay in England have been studied for more than half a century, and about 400 species of shells, 50 or more of fish, besides several kinds of chelonian and saurian reptiles, were known before a single mammifer was detected. At length, in the year 1839, there were found in this formation the remains of a monkey, an opossum, a bat,[222] and a species of the extinct genus Hyracotherium, allied to the Peccary or hog tribe.
If we examine the strata above the London clay in England, we first meet with mammiferous remains in the Isle of Wight, in beds also belonging to the Eocene epoch, such as the remains of the Palaeotherium, Anoplotherium, and other extinct quadrupeds, agreeing very closely with those first found by Cuvier, near Paris, in strata of the same age, and of similar freshwater origin.
In France we meet with another fauna, both conchological and mammalian in the Miocene "faluns" of the Loire; above which in the ascending series in Great Britain we arrive at the coralline crag of Suffolk, a marine formation which has yielded three or four hundred species of shells, very different from the Eocene testacea, and of which a large proportion, although a minority of the whole number, are recent, besides many corals, echini, foraminifera, and fish, but as yet no relic decidedly mammalian except the ear-bone of a whale.
In the shelly sand, provincially termed "Red Crag," in Suffolk, which immediately succeeds the coralline, constituting a newer member of the same tertiary group, about 250 species of shells have been recognized, of which a still larger proportion are recent. They are associated with numerous teeth of fish; but no signs of a warm-blooded quadruped had been detected until 1839, when the teeth of a leopard, a bear, a hog, and a species of ruminant, were found at Newbourn, in Suffolk, and since that time, several other genera of mammalia have been met with in the same formation, or in the Red Crag.[223]
Of a still newer date is the Norwich Crag, a fluvio-marine deposit of the Pleiocene epoch, containing a mixture of marine, fluviatile, and land shells, of which 90 per cent. or more are recent. These beds, since the time of their first investigation, have yielded a supply of mammalian bones of the genera mastodon, elephant, rhinoceros, pig, horse, deer, ox, and others, the bodies of which may have been washed down into the sea by rivers draining land, of which the contiguity is indicated by the occasional presence of terrestrial and freshwater shells.