Handbook to the natural history of Cambridgeshire / edited by J.E. Marr and A.E. Shipley.

Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Handbook to the natural history of Cambridgeshire / edited by J.E. Marr and A.E. Shipley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    82/310 (page 70)
    obtained from the same formation in Huntingdonshire. Pro- bably, however, this is to a great extent due to the circum- stance that they have not been collected in the same careful manner as in the latter county. Of pliosaurs the Oxfordian Pliosaurus ferox, distinguished from Kimeridgian species by its inferior size and the almost complete absence of facetting on the teeth, which are fluted all round, is not improbably represented by certain vertebrae in the Sedgwick Museum from Great Gransden, for which the name Pliosaurus pachy- dirus has been suggested by Professor Seeley \ Remains of the species are also stated to occur in the Oxford Clay of Whittlesea. Of the slender-jawed pliosaurs the above- mentioned Peloneustes philarchus is represented by the im- perfect skeleton of a hind-limb from Whittlesea, preserved in the collection of the British Museum ^ Among the plesio- saurs, remains of Muraenosaurus plicatus and M. richardsoni are recorded from Whittlesea in the British Museum Cata- logue of Fossil Reptiles^ where those species are included in the Cretaceous genus Cimoliosaurus. In the same work reference is made to the occurrence of bones of an ichthyo- saur {Ichthyosaurus thyreospondylus) in the clay pits at Whittlesea. The most interesting specimen from the Oxford Clay of the county is, however, the femur of a small dinosaur, for which the name Cryptosaurus eumerus was at first suggested by Professor Seeley. On account of previous use in another sense, the generic title was subsequently changed by the present writer^ to Cryptodraco. The specimen, which is preserved in the Sedgwick Museum, to which collection it was presented in company with a number of other vertebrate fossils, by Mr L. Ewbank, of Clare College, is Vl\ inches in length, and indicates a small member of the iguanodon group. 1 “ Index to Ornithosauria, etc.” 18. ^ Cat. Foss. Kept. Brit. Mus. ii. 158. 2 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xlv. 46 (1889).