Abstract
THE Entomological Department of the British Museum (Natural History) has recently acquired the collection of the economically important Thysanop-tera, or thrips, formed by Dr. R. S. Bagnall, comprising more than 17,000 specimens, of which about 430 are types and 750 paratypes. Some 8000 insects of various orders, but mainly Diptera, have been collected for the Department in the High Tatra Mountains in Poland and Czechoslovakia by Miss D. Aubertin and Miss E. Trewavas. The King of the Hedjaz, Nejd, and its Dependencies has presented to the Geological Department the collection of fossils made by Mr. H. St. J. Philby on his recent remarkable journey in Central Arabia. It includes invertebrates from the Jurassic rocks of the Tuwaiq plateau and the Cretaceous rocks of the Arma plateau, near Riyadh, the Wahabi capital. From the area south of the Gulf of Bahrein, invertebrates of Miocene age, closely resembling those of contemporaneous rocks in the Persian oilfields, were obtained; while freshwater shells found in abundance at several localities in the middle of the great Rub' al Khali Desert show that rivers or lakes existed recently in that now arid region. The Government Geologist of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan has presented a series of shells of Lower Tertiary age preserved in a remarkable kind of flint; these are the first fossils, other than a few plant remains, to be found in that territory. A large selection of material from the meteorite craters discovered in 1931 near Henbury, Central Australia, has been acquired for the Department of Minerals from the Kyancutta Museum, South Australia. This includes 172 pieces of meteoric iron with a total weight of 604 Ib. The largest piece of 292 Ib. was found in contact with three other masses (total weight 440 Ib.) at a depth of 7 feet in the smallest of the thirteen craters. This is the only meteorite that has ever been excavated from inside a meteorite crater.
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Recent Acquisitions at the Natural History Museum. Nature 130, 659 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130659a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130659a0