On some Fossil Plants from the Jurassic Strata of the Yorkshire Coast

Abstract

The sandstones and shales of the Oolitic series, in the neighbourhood of Scarborough and Whitby, have for many years been known to geologists as being singularly rich in fossil remains of plants, equally remarkable for their beautiful state of preservation as for the variety of forms assembled within a small space. It may be said, indeed, that but for the “plant-beds” at Gristhorpe, Cloughton, Kaiburn, and Whitby, we should know little of the ancient vegetation of the Jurassic period. These localities have supplied, in fact, the types of the Jurassic Flora, with which the comparatively few and scattered specimens of this vegetation, found in other places, have been compared. The first notice of this remarkable extinct Flora is, I believe, to be found in Messrs. Young and Bird's ‘Geological Survey of the Yorkshire Coast,’ in which a certain number of the most striking forms are very imperfectly represented. Many species are named and figured (but not described) in Professor Phillips's valuable work on the ‘Geology of Yorkshire’; a considerable number are well illustrated in Lindley and Hutton's ‘Fossil Flora,’ and in the classical work of Adolphe Brongniart; and very recently the last-named author has given, in his ‘Tableau des Genres de Vegetaux Fossiles,’ a list of 63 species of fossil plants from the Oolites of Scarborough and Whitby; in which list, however, he has omitted some previously published by Phillips and Lindley. But these various works have not exhausted the subject. The rich collections at Scarborough, especially those of Dr.