Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/74

 A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK has been the subject of some discussion. Originally regarded by Professor E. Ray Lankester as the complete tooth of a three-ridged species, it was subsequently considered by the present writer^ to be an imperfect tooth of the four-ridged M. longirostris. A re-examination of the original specimen showed however that this view was untenable, and Professor Lankester ' eventually regarded the specimen as indicating a variety of the three-ridged continental M. angustidens, with the varietal name of lattdens. Since however there is an Indian species known as M. latidens this nomenclature cannot be adopted ; and if the specimen really indicate a race of the aforesaid species, the name M. angustidens latior would be appropriate. The writer is however by no means sure that the speci- men is not an abnormally formed molar of the aforesaid M. longirostris — a species which, by the way, differed from modern elephants in being furnished with tusks in the lower as well as in the upper jaw. Three- ridged molars of quite a different type to the foregoing specimen are met with occasionally in the nodule bed of the Red Crag, as well as in the coprolite bed below the Coralline Crag at Sutton and other localities in the county.^ Many of these specimens, at any rate, appear to belong to the continental Pliocene species known as M. borsoni. It may be added that M. longirostris apparently also occurs in the coprolite bed at the base of the Coralline Crag, a fragmentary tooth being reported to have been obtained from that horizon at Sutton.* Doubt was long entertained as to whether remains of true elephants ever occurred in the Crag. The question is however set at rest by por- tions of two molars in the British Museum ^ from the Red Crag, one of which was obtained at Felixstow, and the other at Falkenham near Woodbridge. These teeth belong to the southern elephant {Elephas meridionalis), a gigantic species more nearly alied to the living African than to the Indian elephant, whose remains are met with abundantly in the Pliocene strata of the continent and the Norfolk Forest Bed, as well as in a remarkable deposit at Dewlish in Dorsetshire. A much-worn mammalian skull, now preserved in the museum at Ipswich, from the nodule bed of the Red Crag at Foxhall, was described in 1874 by Sir William Flower," and identified with an extinct genus of sea-cow, but made the type of a separate species under the name of Hali- therium canhami. The genus Halitherium, which is allied to the modern manati, is met with on the continent in strata of Miocene age, so that the Foxhall skull may be somewhat older than the majority of Red Crag fossils. As would naturally be expected from the small size of most mem- bers of the order, remains of rodents, or gnawing mammals, are very scarce in the Crag. Two cheek-teeth from the Red Crag nodule bed (one from Woodbridge), in the Museum of Practical Geology are how- ' See Cat. Foss. Mamm. Brit. Mus. iv. 62. * Geol. Mag. (4) vi. 289, (1899). ^ See Newton, op. cit. p. 44. * Ibid. 14. ' See Cat. Foss. Mamm. Brit. Mus. iv. 1 13. ° ^art. Jount. Geol. Soc. xxx. i. 38