Fossil Hunting in East Anglia

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FOSSIL-HUNTING IN EAST ANGLIA. BY

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SECRETARY.

A COLLECTION of any natural objects may well be a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, but it must always be regarded as no more than a means to an end, a sort of lexicon of reference for the jogging of one's memory and the determination of species.

Geology is so comprehensive, both in its temporal scope and terrestrial distribution, that mile-stones along its course become imperative for the ticking-off of the successive periods, and no better indicators of individual strata can be set up than the fossils in one's collection which are characteristic of each Stratum in turn. By throwing these roughly into the same order as the formations whence they derive, we obtain in our cabinet—a large wardrobe, fitted with sliding shelves, constitutes an excellent cabinet for all practical private purposes— a microcosm of those layers that go to make up the earth's crust.

Nowhere in the world does one find a better fulcrum from which to cast realisation backward into the dim centuries of geologic ages than in our eastern counties : nowhere does the present so insensibly merge into the past as in the Chalky Boulder-clay that Covers the vast majority of our County's surface, and in the beds of pure white marine shells at Chillesford in Suffolk where a great proportion of them is disintegrated and Nucula Cobboldi, Sow., is abundant, as well as at Aldeby in Norfolk which Mr. Fowler has this year rediscovered at ten feet below the surface. Düring 1930 Mr. Platten has acquired a few interesting mammalian teeth and vertebrae from the Glacial Gravel diggings in the Creeting hills. Beyond those Pleistocene times, cceval with early man and the ice age, we find outcrops of the Newer and Older Pliocene periods.

The Newer is represented by the Forest Bed, whence occur bones of the great Irish Elk (Cervus giganteus, Blum., mentioned in Rider Haggard's delightful tale called Allan and the Ice Gods) and other mammals at Kessingland, Covehithe, Southwold (antler and vertebra by Cooper and patella by Morley), Aldeburgh in 1930, and Felixstow ; as well as by the Mammaliferous Crag, of which Stratum I have discovered a nice exposure in Wangford Wood that yields numerous shells of our present Winkle (Littorina litorea, L.), the narrow and common Cockles (Cardium angustahim, Sow. and C. edule, L.), the old Whelks (Trophon costifer, Wood ; Purpura lapillus, L. ; and P. tetragona, Sow.), the Tower-shells (Cerithium tricinctum, Broc.), Teilina Balthica, L., Cyprina Islandica, L., Lucina borealis L., Mactra ovalis, Sow., Mya arenaria, L. and other bivalves.

But it is in the Older Pliocene that the eastern counties are pre-eminent; and all palseontologists must visit us if they want

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to obtain the multitudes of different shells that lie embedded in and indeed themselves so largely compose, the Red and White seu coralline Crags. In our district are no Oligocene strata whence I have taken fossils in the Isle of Wight; nor such Upper Eocene clay as that, abounding in three hundred sorts of Mollusca, at Barton in Hampshire ; but our Crag is everywhere immediately underlain by Lower Eocene fossilised mud, known as London clay wherein occurs a much harder lime-stone called beptaria, contammg rare univalve shells, though the true Septanen-Thon bed pertains to the Oligocene of Germany.

All the above are Tertiary and post-Tertiary rocks ; and the sole Secondary seu Mesozoic ones that outcrop in Suffolk are Chalk, whence come a goodly number of cretaceous fossils.

Lower strata are penetrated only by borings.

Having thus glanced at the whole, let us work upwards from the basic rocks of East Anglia to its surface, and see what zoological (for I recall finding no botanical, excepting amber) specimens are to be unearthed without going too deeply into the subject.

My own small collection begins with a block of the lossiliferous Slate-mass, given me by Dr. J . E. Taylor F G S that ended the Coal-boring at Stutton by the Stour at'a depth below the surface of 994 feet in November, 1895 (cf. Science Gossip, 1893) ; lt is of a Stratum certainly below the Jurassic, and most probably of the Primary seu Pakeozoic S I L U R I A N , rocks : hence the borers knew they were below all carboniferous strata, and coal to be lacking consequently. The Silur.'an was the age of Tnlobites and Tube-worms, with many Sponges but hardly any Fish and no other vertebrata. Next in antiquity seem to come the Pebbles of Agate etc., which strew our eastshore beach ; but these contain no fossils. Despite our lack of any Oolitic strata, Mr. Fowler has picked up on Beccles Common a mass of the tubes formed by the sea-worm (Serpula vertebralis), denved from its Kimmeridge Clay.

Since Flints are formed within C H A L K by the action of moisture accretmg silica (Trans. Norf. Nat. Soc. vii, p. 148), it is obvious that no more than the matrices of circumj acent fossils can be retamed in them : of such mere casts of bivalve Shells I have examples from Onehouse vĂźlage (found by Miss Watson), Southwold beach and Monks' Soham. But also in the last place have occurred, attached to flints after being washed from chalk, entire valves of the lamellibranchiate shells Inoceramus mconstans, Wood, and Sphondylus spinosus, Sow., carried there

by Boulder-clay, in which was a second of the latter species without Amt. Other local lumps of very hard chalk, showing lce-action, have been bored by one of the molluscan Pholadid shells, which yet remains embedded (most likely Pholas crispata, L., in chalk from base of Norwich Crag) ; in fact, most of my

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cretaceous fossils have been carried here during glacial times.

Miss Watson found the little Oyster (Ostrea canaliculata, Sow.) in the Devils Dyke beyond Newmarket last May ; Mr. Platten took Terebratnla semiglobosa, Sow., in the Claydon chalk ; and, in a Onehouse stone-heap during 1929,1 picked up a block of the scales of the ganoid Fish (Lepidotus gigas, Agass.) obviously derived in drift from the Lias. The Claydon chalk has this year yielded Mr. Platten a somewhat extensive collection of Ammonitidce that yet awaits Classification—excepting a specimen of Ammonites bifrons, most beautifully coated with golden ironpyrites—along with Ichthyopterygian or Sauropterygian vertebrae, and many Gryphcea shells of at least two kinds.

E O C E N E clay is often füll of such accretions of the pretty Selenite seu ' fossilised water ' as was observed in the first part of our Transactions. Though Ammonites do not naturally extend from the Chalk into Eocene strata, at least two apparently local specimens are in Coldham Hall with a large Lutraria shell; and I myself have three or four Ammonites from Monks' Soham, Worlingworth, Cretingham, Brandon and Gunton in Suffolk. These are from the glacial drift, as also at the first village, washed from some Callovian rock, has occurred the beautiful Kepplerites Calloviensis, Sow., one of the tetrabranchiate Nautilids that is very similar to our present Pearly Argonaut {Nautilus pompilius : cf. Naturalist 1853, p. 33). The allied dibranchiate Belemnites do extend through both Chalk and Eocene strata, and are everywhere recognised by their ' Thunder-bolts,' the internal bone vel rostrum vel guard which protects the phragmacone, the Cuttle-fish's interior shell bearing a siphuncle ; I possess examples (including Belemnitella mucronata) from Southwold, Monks' Soham, Brandeston and have even found them washed into Red Crag. Among the Crustacea, Barnacles of the Cirriped family Balanidae occur upon miscellaneous stones ubiquitously: e.g. ice-blotched flints from Brandon and Lakenheath, water-rolled pebbles from Southwold beach and even stones from Red Crag, in which many univalves such as Purpura lapillus, L., are often encrusted with several kinds, the commonest being Baianus bisulcatus. But nearly all the Eocene specimens I have seen seem identical with our present common Little Barnacle (Baianus balanoides), excepting those of the Aldeburgh coralline pit where are abundant the equally small B. inclusus.

One must believe that fossil Sea-urchins seu Echinodermata do turn up in Eocene strata above the chalk, but certainly all I have come across have been carried hither in glacial drift and discovered by the plough in Boulder-clay ; a catalogue of the known Suffolk species appears upon another page.

Great

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blocks that may be some feet across are frequently broken by the plough about Monks' Soham and other places in mid-Suffolk, wherein they have been carried as drift from the underlying Eocene : such blocks are totally composed of thousands of Tubeworms (Annelida, mainly of the genus Ditrypa) that lived in an old sea. Typical of our Eocene clay, though washcd from Lias seas, is the tremendously thick shell known as the ' Devilstoenail' (Gryphcea incurva, Sow.) ; it is by no means rare and I have valves varying from one to three inches in length found at Framlingham, Kenton, Monks' Soham, Onehouse and Westleton, where it occurred during 1900 in its clay-matrix at the Lamb-pits. Other sorts of shells have been conveyed in drift, such as the lamellibranchiate Cardinia cuneata, Stut., from mesozoic Lias; the brachiopod Lamp-shell Rhynchonella plicatilis, Sow., from mesozoic Chalk ; Oysters (identical with our present Ostrea edulis, L. : all three species picked up in my Monks' Soham garden), and at least four other kinds of bivalves.

Amber is fossilised resin ; and resin, as everyone knows, is sap of pine-trees : there most folk rest content. But, when we find the pine-resin of Scots and Spruce firs in the Cromer Forest Bed to be in a condition little altered from that of to-day, it becomes evident that we have to search lower for Amber. Clement Reid has lucidly indicated (Tr. Norf. Nat. Soc. iii, p. 601) the extreme probability that our east-coast Amber, known to be the sap of the extinct conifer Pinites succinifer, Goepp, has been no more than derived by the Cromer bed from an older OLIGOCENE Stratum which extends from the Prussian coast nearly or quite to the British three-mile territorial waters across the North Sea. If the latter be the case, we may include as Suffolcian this Prussian forest bed, between the Coralline Crag of Pliocene times and the London clay of the Eocene epoch. Certainly I have found silicified Conifer brancheS, presumably of the above extinct tree, upon Bawdsey beach this year ; and others are in the Thetford Museum. But, whether we may claim the matrix or not, Amber washed from it is commoner upon the Suffolk shore than any of the adj acent ones : Southwold beach is celebrated for the size of the masses locally picked up. My own experience is that Dunwich shows best as a centre for such collection ; and on lOth July, 1914, I found nearly as many specimens at Aldeburgh as are contained in all the rest of my trover combined.

However, these are all quite small, the largest being but 1| inches in length (and Mr. Doughty's largest, from Southwold, is of only by 1ยง inches).* About 1925 small bits were *In September, 1930, Southwold shops, with a Single exception, exhibited no blocks larger than some 4 x 1 J x 1 J inches ; none of the Aldeburgh ones had any quite so large.

The exception is a splendid mass of 7 J x 4 J x 4 inches, recently trawled within the three-mile limit off Southwold, and taken by the smack into Lowestoft.

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washed up every few yards at Gorleston, but really large pieces occur almost exclusively in trawl-nets ; and none of them have a trace of enclosed insects, which are very rarely seen in Norfolk amber.

Reid (loc. cit.) knew but three Cromer instances, of which one showed Aphis-laxvaz, with a fly of the Dolichopod genus Chrysotils ; and another lump from Yarmouth exhibited a gall-gnat of the genus Cecidomyia, with two specimens of the Mycetophilid-gnat genus Leia, of which Low knew (Uber den Bernstein und die Bernsteinfauna : Meseritze, 1850) no less than twenty-two kinds. Later Foord records (Tr. cit. v, p. 92) in ' East Coast Amber' insects of the three Coleopterous genera Clems, Piatypus and Tomicus ; a specimen of our common Cockroach (Blatta orientalis, L.) ; two of our common Honey Bee (Apis mellifica, L.); a species of the Neuropterous genus Psocus ; and three Diptera, which are a gnat resembling an Anopheles mosquito, a meat-fly like a rostrated Sarcophaga, and a dung-fly that seems to be a Scatophaga : along with a couple of Arachnid spiders of which one is very like our abundant Epiblemum scenicum, Clk., a leaf and a mass of ? pollen. Just how many of them are of local origin is not stated ; but that ' flies in amber ' occur with us, as well as upon the Baltic shores, is plainly shown.

Finallv we rise to our two PLIOCENE Crags, by far the most prolific fossil-quarries in the County. Quartering arable land in winter and turning over stone-heaps are almost the sole methods of acquiring all the above vestiges of lost creation, nor are they particularly fruitful ones at t h a t ! But in the case of Crag we are like a weevil in a biscuit, for the formation itself is built up almost totally of fossils, and nothing remains to us but selection of the most perfect specimens. I am acquainted with more than one farm-stackyard that is surrounded by a wall of virgin Crag, varying in height from six to ten feet, and so hard that nothing but the air's oxygen combined with the rain-water's carbon dioxide can disintegrate it; also a pit, that was excavated at Foxhall especially for the British Association's benefit in 1895, exposed a forty-feet face of Red Crag, whence came all the best of my earlier collection. This spring I traversed the flat arable field now covering its site ! The ränge of Crag fossils is great, and extends from Tube-worms of the genus Serpula, to the highest vertebrates below man. Lumps of the older Coralline Crag, upon Thorpe Denes near Aldeburgh, are always füll of such tubes of S. protensa on Peden-sheWs ; and last spring the Sudbourn and Aldeburgh* pits afforded fine examples of the • A l d e b u r g h is usually cited as t h e n o r t h e r n m o s t extension of Coralline outcrop.

B u t in S e p t e m b e r I find it exposed in a n overgrown pit, w h e n c e it e x t e n d s a few h u n d r e d y a r d s t o t h e shore, slightly n o r t h of T h o r p e ; and a half-mile y e t f u r t h e r n o r t h it emerges in t h e low cliff a t t e n f e e t above t h e sea-denes.

However, other blocks t h a t are f o u n d u p o n Sizewell beach are obviously n o more t h a n washed t h e r e b y t h e tide f r o m s o u t h e r n deposits.

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polyzoan Fascicularia aurantium, MEdw. (fig. Lyell, Elem.

164), which is typical of this Stratum : it is among the lowest form of Mollusc and resembles Zoophytes. The Monograph of the Crag Shells, by the late Searles Wood of Beaconhill in Martlesham, enumerates 316 different kinds from the Coralline, and a total of 641 in Suffolk from all our three, Crags : also, Harmer's incomplete later work adds to this number. Hence these Shells must be left for especial enumeration by an expert, and my remarks shall be confined to other treasures occurring in these strata.

The lowest in zoological order that I know are the Corals, which Madrepors have existed from Silurian times and are represented in the Red Crag at Foxhall by at least Balanophyllia calicula, Wood, taken by me in 1894. Sea-urchins must be very uncommon, for never have I discovered one there ; but claws of our present Edible Crab (Cancer pagurus, L.) occasionally turn up at Foxhall, Gedgrave and Butley ; along with the harder parts of other Crustacea, such as a rather large Barnacle (.Baianus crassus of Hugh Miller's Testimony, 110). Of our seven species of Pliocene Sharks' teeth, at Foxhall are found the acute little ones of Odontaspis elegans, Agass., often having their cutting-edge quite sharp and unrolled by water, those of Oxyrhina hastalis, with the small ones of Lamna Vincenti, W., and the large ones of Odotus obliquus.

Other Fish, though sparsely recorded, must have been abundant in our Pliocene seas, for palatal bones of Rays, Raidse of the genus Myliobatis (quite possibly of the species tumidens), with vertebrae of other teleost Pisces, are by no means rare both there, at Gedgrave and Bawdsey. The presence of such vertebrae upon the Breckheaths of north-west Suffolk, where I found some in 1906, indicates an unexpected westward drift in the Pleistocene period, for no Pliocene strata are known to outcrop in Cambridgeshire. Also at Brandon in both 1916 and 1924 I picked up numerous rolled coprolites with those ' tympanic ' ear-bones of Balcenodon Whales, which at Foxhall sometimes extend to fully a couple of inches in length (cf. Henslow of Hitcham in Geol.

Proc., Dec. 1843). Throughout at least the past two years Cetacean bones, washed out of the Crag cliff, wherein they occur also at Shottisham, have been strewing Bawdsey beach in hundreds ; I carried home a half-dozen of the smallest of them, some eight inches by 2j, and believe them to pertain to the Right Whale (Baleena "australis, of which the final British example on record was stranded near Yarmouth in 1846). Part of the antler of a Deer (Cervus PFalconeri) occurred to me in mammaliferous crag at Bulchamp White House in October this year. From the Butley crag about 1870, I have been given a knee-bone—half the apex of a femur, Dr. Vinter teils me—ot

Tusk of Elephas meridionalis.

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117 some great pachyderm that I suppose to be an Elephant (Elephas meridionalis) ; this species is typical of Pleistocene strata and the tusk herefigured*was discovered in 1922 at Sudbury, where it remains in Mr. Jordan's possession : Norwich Museum displays a similar molar from Corton in Suffolk, and others are lying loose in the Lowestoft Library. Major Cooper has the trochanter of a Mammoth (E. primigenius, Blum.), that was exposed in Easton cliff last winter ; and scraps of such mammalian bones also turn up, though rarely, in the older Foxhall cragpits, along with the already-recorded tooth of Rhinoceros Schleiermachen (Trans. Suff. Nat. Soc. i, p. 77).

In consideration of the great number of Coprolite Pits that have been not only abandoned but filled in and so rendered useless to modern palaeontologists, such as all the ones at Boyton and Waldringfield, it may be useful and obviate wasted j ourneys to enumerate those that I personally have found to be workable still in 1930 :—(l)CorallineCrag: Aldeburgh; Iken; Sudbourn, two pits and a third with many rabbit-scrapings in the park ; Gedgrave, three pits ; Ramsholt ; Sutton, two pits of which one shows a face fifteen feet high and a hundred-and-fifty paces long, likely the finest exposure in the world ; I know of none in Orford, and must consider records thence as indicating adj acent vilages. (2) Red Crag: Sudbourn ; Chilesford ; Butley, four pits ; Eyke ; Ufford, two pits ; Foxhall, where also examine rabbit-scratches ; Hollesley ; Newbourn, two pits ; Shottisham, two pits; Alderton Walks ; Ramsholt, two pits ; Sutton, three Pits ; Sudbury, two pits, with bones at Brundon; Tattingstone; Bawdsey cliff; and Bentley, Suffolk's southernmost outcrop.

(3) Mammaliferous Crag : Bramerton in Norfolk, two pits ; Bulchamp in Blythburgh, two pits ; and Wangford. (4) Aldeby Bed: Aldeby in Norfolk. (5) Chilesford Bed: Chilesford and Easton cliff, which last September I found to be exposed here and there for 125 paces north and south, rising in the twenty-foot cliff-face to only forty-four inches from beachlevel. Here we have a total of nearly fifty centres of activity.

FLAT-FISHES' INTELLIGENCE.—Dr. Collings, our Member at Southwold, once showed me someflat-fishand small Whiting (Gadus merlangus, Linn.), which he had in a marine aquarium.

When he dropped in food, the Whiting took it before it reached the bottom of the tank, so that theflat-fishgot none. The latter soon found that, if they wanted food, they must imitate the Whiting and so they thenceforth became, for all practical purposes, surface fecders.—DR. MARK TAYLOR. *This illustration we owe to the courtesy of the ' East Anglian Daily Times.'—ED.