Page:VCH Staffordshire 1.djvu/65

 PALAEONTOLOGY WITH the exception of a very few obtained from the superficial deposits, the vertebrate fossils of Staffordshire seem to be restricted to the horizons of the Trias and the Coal Measures. Although the Coal Measure vertebrates are by far the more numerous, those from the Trias are, as a whole, much the more interesting, on account of the rarity, at least in this country, of the types to which they belong. An exception in this respect must, however, be made in the case of the shark-remains from the Coal Measures belonging to the genus Edestus, of which they are the only known British representatives. Of mammalian remains from the Pleistocene formations of the county a list has been drawn up by Mr. John Ward of Longton, and published in the Transactions of the North Staffordshire Field Club for igoa. 1 The earliest record dates back to 1688, when Robert Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire p, relates that a jaw and a tooth of a young elephant doubtless the mammoth (Elephas primigenius] were found in a marl-pit near Trentham. Probably it is these speci- mens which are referred to on page 258 of Owen's British Fossil Mammals and Birds, as having come under the observation of Dean Buckland. Be this as it may, Robert Garner, in his Natural History of the County of Stafford (1844), refers to the occurrence at Trentham and other places in the county, both in diluvial gravel, and also in the clay at the bottom of certain caves, of the bones of the red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe-buck (Capreolus capreolus), rhinoceros, elephant, and hyaena. The rhinoceros was doubtless the woolly Siberian Rhinoceros antiquitatis, while the elephant was probably the mammoth, and the hyaena the large cave race (Hyaena crocuta spelaea] of the existing South African spotted species. Parkinson, in his Organic Remains, figured a mammoth's molar from Staffordshire, which figure is reproduced on page 239 of Owen's work already cited; and in 1864 Mr. J. Plant* exhibited before the Man- chester Geological Society a series of the teeth and bones of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the Pleistocene race of the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius major) which had been found in the county. 1 Vol. xxxvi, 90. * Trans. Manchester Geol. Sue. v, 42. 1 33 5