A RHINOCEROS BONE FROM BRIERTON, NEAR WEST HARTLEPOOL

Abstract

During November 1938 a large bone broken at the upper end, 12 inches long and 5 1/4 inches wide, was found at a depth of 20 feet in a sand and gravel quarry at Brierton and sent to the Gray Art Gallery and Museum at West Hartlepool, With the kind assistance of Miss D. M. Bate of the British Museum, Natural History, it was identified as a humerus of R. tichorinus or antiquitatis . It was found to agree very closely with a similar bone from Kent’s Cavern, Torquay. Brierton (or Brearton, on older maps) 2 1/2 miles south-west of West Hartlepool is situated where the Magnesian Limestone and Triassic red beds adjoin. This junction, whether it be a fault or not, is entirely concealed by drift but the general slope of the country is a gentle one to the south or south-east. The last ice sheet melting as it retreated northwards from the slopes of the Cleveland Hills deposited clay, gravel, and sand in the form of a series of low irregular scarcely noticeable mounds which attain an altitude of only a little above 100 feet above sea level. Two quarries have been opened by Mr. T. Gallimore in these gravelly and sandy deposits; the one to the south-west where the bone was found shows about 30 feet of very regularly bedded sand and gravel overlain and partly replaced at the east end of the quarry by some 10 feet of brown stony boulder clay. The sand is much current …