Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/395

Rh upper premolar of a small species of Rhinoceros. This specimen, which is being sent to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, together with the collection made by Col. Nichols and myself at Yenangyoung and Mandalay, was brought to us at Twingon village by a Burman oil-well owner. Oil is the only industry there, and certain tracts are reserved for native owners to work by their primitive methods. They are not allowed to drill by machinery, but they dig wells and get oil at about three hundred feet. On asking whether they do not sometimes come across fossils, one man produced the above tooth, saying that he had found it at about one hundred and fifty cubits down, and he had never found anything else. The specimen is black, and beautifully polished from lying in the oil-sands, and on one side it had been rubbed down on some level surface, producing facets on three separate prominences. There is, however, no question in this case, as the man said he had rubbed it down himself to find out of what it was made. He apparently did not know it was a tooth, but kept it as a curiosity. I do not, of course, suggest that the femur was rubbed down in this way, but it is no longer unique; and, if Dr. Noetling is by any chance in error in supposing that it had not been previously disturbed when he found it, there is always the chance that it came by its peculiarities in this way.

Now as to this, surely the most remarkable thing about the bone is that it should have remained intact—that is, unbroken—in a stratum in which, so far as I know, all other bones are reduced to rolled fragments. The femur of a Hippopotamus is not a small bone by any means, and if such animals as Rhinoceros perimensis and Hippotherium antelopinum are represented in the conglomerate only by isolated teeth and fragments of bone, how comes it that this bone alone exists unbroken? And the difficulty is not made less by the consideration that this very specimen, thus curiously preserved, is found to be one on which Tertiary man has been exercising his ingenuity. I am aware that Dr. Noetling found it in a subordinate patch, either fifteen or fifty feet above the zone of H. antelopinum, and not in that zone itself, but he himself describes such patches as made up of "small pieces of drift-wood fossilized into hydroxide of iron, small pebbles of white quartz, or of a ferruginous claystone, and rolled