Abstract
THE disappearance of the last traces of the ‘submerged forest's at the old peat beds of the Lancashire and Cheshire coast, where the tides have now washed away all trace of the prehistoric tree stumps that littered the shores so abundantly at West Kirby, Hoylake, Dove Point and Leasowe on the Cheshire shore, and Hightown and Blundellsands on the Lancashire shore, has robbed geologists in particular of one of the most extensive of these collections on the British coasts. The submerged forests near Liverpool have perhaps been more closely studied than any others of these remains, and a generation ago the stumps that littered parts of the coast numbered many hundreds and were widely known. None now remains. Numerous remains of the antler deer (Cervus elaphus), wild oxen (Bos longifrons and B. primigenius), the metacarpel of a roe deer (Capreolus caprcea) and of domestic animals as the horse, dog, and in 1873 the skull of Homo sapiens, have been taken from these submerged forests in the Liverpool area. Smith (Proc. Historic Soc. Lanes, and Cheshire, 18) describes an unusually fine pair of horns of the larger form of the red deer taken at Leasowe, 1863, each antler forty inches long and the pair measuring seven feet from tip to tip, while Liverpool Museum received a large number from Hightown in 1916 (Proc. Liverpool GeoL Soc., 14). Roots of Osmunda and shells of Buccinum, Turritella, Scribicularia, Tellina and Nutica have also been obtained from the blue silt below the peat beds.
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Disappearance of Submerged Forests. Nature 132, 961 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132961c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132961c0