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A HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE In 1864 Mr. Brockbank 8 recorded from a fissure in the Carboni- ferous Limestone at Bank End Quarry, Waterhouses, on the bank of the River Hamps, numerous remains of the mammoth, and it has been subsequently stated * that the collection obtained by Plant came from this spot. Mr. Ward records the extinct wild ox, or aurochs (Bos taurus prim/genius), from a bed near Etruria station, where a fine skull was found in 1877, and also a mammoth-tusk from Fenton. The aurochs and the domesticated Celtic shorthorn (the so-called Bos longifrons] are also recorded from Stone. The first evidence of vertebrate life recorded from the Keuper, or Upper Division of the Trias (New Red Sandstone), was in the form of casts of footsteps. These have been observed in quarries at Hollington and Alton * in North Staffordshire, in the building-stones of the Lower Keuper ; while others have been recorded from South Staffordshire along the outcrop of the harder beds of the Keuper a few miles north- west of Wolverhampton.' Yet others have been described from Stanton, two and a half miles from Burton-on-Trent, and also from Coven, near Brewood, in the southern division of the county. 7 These latter have been provisionally assigned to the rhynchocephalian reptile Rhynchosaurus, a forerunner of the living New Zealand tuatera (Spbenodon) t of which remains are recorded from the Keuper of Grinshill in Shropshire. Of those from the first-named localities some, at any rate, are, however, referable to Cbirosaurus (or Cbirotberiuni), creatures definitely known only by footprints of this type, but which have been generally regarded as large primeval salamanders, or labyrinthodont amphibians. This view is to some extent supported by the discovery in the Staffordshire Keuper of the skull of an undoubted labyrinthodont of considerable size, although not perhaps sufficiently large to have made footsteps of the biggest size known. This skull, which exhibits chiefly a cast of the inside of the upper surface, was discovered in a quarry at Stanton, about three miles from Norbury, in the building- stone of the Keuper. It was first described and figured by the late Mr. John Ward in the Transactions of the North Staffordshire Field Club for 1900,' where it is referred to the genus Dasycefs, typically from the Permian of Kenilworth ; but it has been again described and figured by Dr. A. Smith Woodward in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1904,' under the name of Capitosaurus stantonensis. The genus to which the Stanton labyrinthodont is now referred occurs typically in the Keuper of Wiirtemberg. Some of the Keuper footprints may, on the other hand, have belonged to rhynchocephalian reptiles, of the occurrence of which in this formation decisive evidence has been recently obtained. This evidence Proc. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. (1864), 46. ' Aitkin, Trans. Manchester Geol. Soc. xii, 25. H. C. Beasley, Proc. Liverpool Geol. Soc. J. Lomas, Rep. Brit. Assoc. for 1903, p. 5 ; and Beeby Thompson, Geol. Mag. (4), ix, (1902). Lydekker, Cat. Foss. Rept. Brit. Mus. iv, 2 1 9. Vol. xxxiv, 1 08, pis. iv, v. 9 Vol. ii, 171, pis. xi, xii. 34