The Pre-Crag Men of East Anglia

Abstract

IT is common knowledge that the Suffolk Bone Bed beneath the Red Crag is made up largely of the remains of a land surface which existed, for a prolonged period, prior to the submergence of East Anglia beneath the sea of Crag times. Sir Ray Lankester pointed out many years ago¹ that the bones and teeth of land mammals found in the Suffolk Bone Bed are of different ages—some being of a Miocene antiquity, while others are to be referred to certain phases of the Pliocene epoch. He was able also to show that the tooth of a mastodon, by reason of its being partly embedded in a deposit of Diestian sandstone, must be older than this Lower Pliocene accumulation, which is represented in the Suffolk Bone Bed by the well-known fossiliferous box-stones. Thus, by these investigations, it was made clear that, so far as the remains of terrestrial mammals are concerned, the contents of the Suffolk Bone Bed are markedly derivative and referable to widely separated periods anterior to the deposition of the Red Crag.