The Geological Age of the Cromer Forest Bed

Abstract

The present writer has had recently the opportunity to carry out a revision of the deer of the Cromer Forest Bed series of East Anglia. The entire work is to be published in the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). The stratigraphical conclusions will be summarized here.The occurrence of relatively archaic species together with more modern species in the Forest Bed fauna has puzzled many palaeontologists. Whereas the older authors concluded that it was wholly Pliocene (Reid, 1890, with bibliography) or partially or totally derived (Dubois, 1905), more recently a tendency has become prevalent to attribute the whole fauna to the early Pleistocene, and to explain the more archaic species as relics (Osborn, 1922; Zeuner, 1945). It may be shown that all these interpretations are untenable.A Pliocene age is ruled out by the presence of species which immigrated into Europe after the close of the Villafranchian. On the other hand, the older representatives, once attributed to the Pliocene but actually of Upper Villafranchian age, do not constitute isolated relics: an entire faunal assemblage characteristic of that epoch is present. Moreover, primitive species occur in the Forest Bed fauna together with their more advanced descendants, and the fauna is richer in species than in any other locality.