Abstract
THE Zoological Department of the Museum has secured a mounted example of an exceedingly rare marsupial mouse, Gœnolestes obscurus, from Mount Pichincha, Quito, Ecuador. This species belongs to that group of marsupials which, from the possession of only two incisor teeth in the lower jaw, is known as the Diprotodontia. Except for this solitary species, found in a restricted area of the high Alpine country of the Central Andes in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, the diprodont marsupials are found only in the Australian region. The Department of Entomology has acquired the important collection of British Coleoptera (beetles) formed by the late Dr. David Sharp, who died in 1922. The collection comprises nearly 114,000 specimens, most of which were collected by Dr. Sharp himself. Dr. Sharp's general collection of Coleoptera, consisting of at least 300,000 specimens from all parts of the world, was purchased by the Museum in 1905. More than 4000 additional foreign specimens have been received with the British collection. The Trustees have approved the purchase for the Department of Geology of a collection of Nothosaurs from the Alpine Trias of Besano. These small swimming reptiles were precursors of the better known Plesiosaurs. The specimens acquired appear to belong to two species of the genus Pachypleuro-saurus. There has been placed on exhibition in the Department of Geology, near the entrance, the first of a contemplated series of scenes representing the fish-fauna of succeeding geological epochs. It shows reconstruction-models of fish-like animals and true fishes that lived just when the Silurian was passing into the Devonian period. They are the earliest ‘back-boned’ animals of which fossil remains have been found. The models are posed in an illuminated scene, the surface of the underwater scene being just below the eye of a spectator of average height; at the eye-level, the distant hills of the Old Red Sandstone period are seen.
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Recent Acquisitions at the Natural History Museum. Nature 129, 645–646 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129645c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129645c0