The Student's Elements of GeologyLyell, Charles, Sir
Science
The Student's Elements of Geology
Lyell, Charles, Sir
Geology
Upper Miocene of the Bolderberg, in Belgium.—In a small hill or ridge
called the Bolderberg, which I visited in 1851, situated near Hasselt,
about forty miles E.N.E. of Brussels, strata of sand and gravel occur,
to which M. Dumont first called attention as appearing to constitute a
northern representative of the faluns of Touraine. On the whole, they
are very distinct in their fossils from the two upper divisions of the
Antwerp Crag before mentioned (p. 204), and contain shells of the
genera _Oliva, Conus, Ancillaria, Pleurotoma,_ and _ Cancellaria_ in
abundance. The most common shell is an Olive (Fig. 146), called by Nyst
_Oliva Dufresnii_; and constituting, as M. Bosquet observes, a smaller
and shorter variety of the Bordeaux species.
So far as the shells of the Bolderberg are known, the proportion of
recent species agrees with that in the faluns of Touraine, and the
climate must have been warmer than that of the Coralline Crag of
England.
Upper Miocene Beds of the Vienna Basin.—In South Germany the general
resemblance of the shells of the Vienna tertiary basin with those of
the faluns of Touraine has long been acknowledged. In the late Dr.
Hörnes’s excellent work on the fossil mollusca of that formation, we
see accurate figures of many shells, clearly of the same species as
those found in the falunian sands of Touraine.
According to Professor Suess, the most ancient and purely marine of the
Miocene strata in this basin consist of sands, conglomerates,
limestones, and clays, and they are inclined inward, or from the
borders of the trough towards the centre, their outcropping edges
rising much higher than the newer beds, whether Miocene or Pliocene,
which overlie them, and which occupy a smaller area at an inferior
elevation above the sea. M. Hornes has described no less than 500
species of gasteropods, of which he identifies one-fifth with living
species of the Mediterranean, Indian, or African seas, but the
proportion of existing species among the lamellibranchiate bivalves
exceeds this average. Among many univalves agreeing with those of
Africa on the eastern side of the Atlantic are _Cypræa sanguinolenta,
Buccinum lyratum,_ and _Oliva flammulata._ In the lowest marine beds of
the Vienna basin the remains of several mammalia have been found, and
among them a species of _Dinotherium_, a Mastodon of the _Trilophodon_
family, a Rhinoceros (allied to _R. megarhinus_, Christol), also an
animal of the hog tribe, _ Listriodon_, von Meyer, and a carnivorous
animal of the canine family. The _Helix turonensis_ (Fig. 38), the
most common land shell of the French faluns, accompanies the above land
animals. In a higher member of the Vienna Miocene series are found
_Dinotherium giganteum_ (Fig. 136), _Mastodon longirostris, Rhinoceros
Schleiermacheri, Acerotherium incisivum,_ and _ Hippotherium gracile,_
all of them equally characteristic of an Upper Miocene deposit
occurring at Eppelsheim, in Hesse Darmstadt; a locality also remarkable
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