On the Occurrence of a Fossil Petro-tympanic Bone of a Whale from the Crag near Ipswich

Abstract

During a visit to the Crag district of Suffolk in July 1844, while travelling up the Orwell towards Ipswich, and at a short distance below Holywells, a celebrated Crag locality, I observed a patch of crag on the upper part of a somewhat lofty portion of the bank of the river, and went ashore to examine it. I had not long searched the mass, which consisted chiefly of broken shells, ere I found a heavy nodule, which I soon recognised as the tympanic bone of a Cetacean. It is nearly perfect, having only a portion about an inch in length broken from one end of it. Its fractured extremity exhibits the following characters:—The central portion is of the colour of ferruginous clay; there is next a band of dark ferruginous stain, and exterior to the last a layer of an ochrey colour, somewhat darker than the central portion, and which is easily chipped from the dark-coloured layer; innumerable minute indentations are visible upon its surface, more particularly upon the involuted portion. The colour of the different layers observed in my specimen is undoubtedly derived from a ferruginous infiltration; the texture is that of exceedingly dense bone,—a solidity appropriate to the function of the organ to which it belongs, and very unlike the texture of some coprolitic (?) bodies I possess from the Crag, which exhibit somewhat similar concentric bands, but a decidedly crystalline fracture, particularly in the dark-coloured bands. The long diameter of my fossil is three and a quarter