On Acanthopolis platypus (Seeley), a Pachypod from the Cambridge Upper Greensand / by Harry G. Seeley.

  • Seeley, H. G. (Harry Govier), 1839-1909.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On Acanthopolis platypus (Seeley), a Pachypod from the Cambridge Upper Greensand / by Harry G. Seeley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [From tlie Annals and Magazine op Natural History for If member 1871.] On Acanthopholis platypus [Seeley), a Pachypod from the Cambridge Upper Greensand. By Harry G. Seeley, F.G.S., St. John’s College, Cambridge. [Plate VII.] There is no period in English geology in which the rocks themselves have not furnished evidence of the proximity of land to what are now om’ coasts. Occasionally they prove the present land and the past lands to have in pait included each other; and in between these periods of similar altitude the depression is rarely if ever so profound or wide-spread as to remove the land to a distance too great to be measured ap- proximately in miles by the evidence from the distribution of its detritus. But when the stratigraphic teaching becomes difficult to read or unravel in reasoning, then the fossils come to hand, in a rough way cut the knot that could not be untied, and invest the subject with new interest in the distribution of life; for sea-life, land-life, and river-life are in the main so different from each other, that they give evidence of the extent of strata and of the causes which limited them which are second only in usefulness to the lithological and petrologic facts. Among such obscure problems, but for its fossils, would have been the history of the Cambridge Upper Greensand—a mere junction-bed between the Gault and the Chalk; but the fossil fruits, the sea-birds allied to Colymhus and the penguins, the flocks of aerial quadrupeds (Ornithosaurs), the schools of Emydian Chelonians, and, lastly, the land-quadruped Acan- thopholis, point to their home in a not distant country, of which the other deposits between the Gault and Chalk to the south and north help to tell the whereabouts and history.