F. W. HARMER ON THE KESSINGLAND CLIFF-SECTION.
130
Mastodon, lihinoceros, and other animals whose remains occur in this stone -bed been buried in it at the time they died, or soon after, we could not fail to find a proportionally greater number of bones than
Fig. 3. — Section representing the supposed Conditions under which the Stone-bed ccdled Land-surface at the Base of the Norwich Crag was formed.
ncff*
^HiEHiaiJ-ittilSiS
1. Low cliff of Chalk with rows of flints (a) in situ.
2. Beds of Older and Newer Pliocene age, capping the Chalk and contain-
ing the remains of Mastodon arvcnicusis and other Mammalia. b. Talus of chalk- flints, passing into b r , the basement-bed of the Norwich Crag, as the sea encroached on the land.
of teeth ; we should sometimes meet with entire skeletons *, or portions of them, with associated bones more or less in juxtaposition, and we should often find jaws with teeth attached, as we do in the undisturbed Cromer Forest-bed and elsewhere; but the very reverse of all this is the case. The supposition, on the other hand, that these worn and fragmentary teeth were derived from the waste of some older deposit explains these facts. The bones of a skeleton, washed by waves from a cliff, fragile as such fossil remains always are, would be, as a rule, quickly destroyed, while the teeth, being harder, would be preserved and buried a second time. The cliff, of course, would be worn away as the land sank and became submerged.
A similar stone-bed occasionally overlies, and is bedded up to, the denuded remnants of the Forest (which is by no means the continuous formation it has sometimes been represented to be) on the North Norfolk coast. It often contains mammalian fossils derived from the freshwater deposit associated with the true Forest-bed in the imme- diate neighbourhood, and has sometimes been mistaken for those deposits in situ. It extends laterally beyond the limits of that for- mation, forming, as at Weybourne, on the surface of the Chalk, the basement bed of the Lower Glacial Pebbly sands. It contains at that place marine shells of the same species as the deposit which overlies it. The bed of flints in question at the base of the Norwich
- The statement that an entire skeleton of the Mastodon was found some
years ago at Horstead, is one which rests entirely on hearsay evidence, and is, I believe, from inquiries I have made, unworthy of credit.
