PALÆONTOLOGY
SO far at least as published records go, Buckinghamshire seems to be exceedingly poor in vertebrate fossils, the only specimens of any real interest being a few teeth of dinosaurian reptiles and certain remains of fishes from the Purbeck and Portland strata of Aylesbury and its neighbourhood.
From certain Pleistocene deposits at Fenny Stratford the British Museum possesses two imperfect molar teeth and a tusk of the mammoth (Elepbas primige nius), which were presented by Sir Philip Duncombe in 1873.[1] And the occurrence of these specimens suggests that careful search would bring to light remains of other of the contemporary mammals in the neighbourhood. Teeth of the wild boar (Sus scrofa ferus) have indeed been dredged from the bed of the Ouse at NewportPagnell.
From coprolite-pits in the Cambridge Greensand near Puttenham remains of three species of vertebrates, commonly met with in that formation in Cambridgeshire, have been recorded by Mr. JukesBrowne.[2] These, according to modern nomenclature, are Ichthyosaurus campylodon, one of the extinct ' fish-lizards '; Protosphyrcena ferox, a large fish with spear-like teeth; and Lamna appendiculata a widelyspread species of Cretaceous shark. Ichthyosaurus campylodon is likewise said to have been obtained from the Chalkmarl of Waddon.
The Lower Greensand coprolite-beds at Rushmoor yield vertebrate fossils, derived chiefly from the Kimeridge Clay, similar to those found at Potton in Bedfordshire, but no list of the species seems to have been published, and no great interest attaches to the occurrence of the remains in question. Lower down in the geological scale the Purbeck beds of Aylesbury have yielded part of the lower dentition of a fossil fish belonging to the group of pycnodont ganoids which Dr. Smith Woodward[3] has made the type of a distinct species, under the name of Athrodon intermedius. This unique specimen is in the British Museum. Other remains in the same collection from the Purbeck of Hartwell and Bishopstone indicate a very different type of ganoid fish belonging to the widely-spread Jurassic genus Pleuropholis; the name P. serrata[4] has been proposed for the Buckinghamshire species.
Of wider interest are the crowns of two teeth of a gigantic
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