Interesting Discovery of Bones of Extinct Animals at Conisbro’.

Our scientific readers will be glad to note a most interesting discovery of osseous remains of animals of the Pleistocene age in the limestone crags at Conisbro’. The workmen engaged in excavating the cutting for the pipes in connection with the Doncaster Water Works came upon several fossil bones of unusual size. Some of these passed into the hands of the men employed on the works, who kept them as a “wonderful find,” but was ignorant of their true character.

Information of the discovery reaching the ears of Mr. E. B. Jenkinson, F.G.S., of Swinton, that gentleman purchased them and others afterwards obtained, and sent them to Professor Boyd Dawkins, of Owens College, Manchester, for identification. The gentleman being a distinguished palaeontologist, and noted cave hunter, identified them as the bones of the Elephas or Mammoth, the Rhinoceros Tichorinus (woolly rhinoceros), and the horse; and also pointed out that some of the bones had been gnawed by hyænas. To those versed in geological facts, the discovery of relics of mammals utterly extinct now in Great Britain is not a matter for wonder; for at Robin Hood’s Cave, in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire, and at Wookey Hole, near Wells, Somersetshire, and at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, the remains of the elephant, rhinoceros, hyæna, and other animals have been found in large quantities. The scientific reader will be startled however, when he reads, that our own country was once the habitat of beasts so gigantic, and so savage.

The bones found in the rocks at Conisbro’, are the femur, the radius, the tibia, and the shaft of humerus of woolly rhinocera; the metacarpal of horse; and the tibia of elephas (probably mammoth). The age of these bones is almost incalculable. It is very improbable that man existed when these particular animals ranged the shores of rivers and lakes. The length of time that has elapsed may be conceived when we consider that the river Don has cut out its present bed since the time when these animals lived; cut, by a slow process, through the hard magnesian limestone strata down to the coal measures, wearing away year by year the limestone, unaided by the hand of man, or any force in nature, and carrying down the detritus to the low lying lands near Doncaster, and so becoming the comparatively narrow stream, pent up by the hills of limestone formation, that it now is.

The position in which the bones were found, imbedded in clay, was most probably not their original resting place, but which was most likely one of the caves so common in the limestone districts. The fact of the bones being gnawed by hyæna points to the existence of one of these homes of the carnivorous species. No evidence of a cave, however, was to be found on the spot, though specimens of stalagmite show clearly how caves and crevasses are formed in the strata, namely, by the action of water. If these animals had been destroyed, or died, near the edge of the river Don—which would then be a broad lake, extending across the valley from Denaby on the one side to Melton on the other—when they came to drink, it is scarcely likely that such a variety of bones would have been found in one spot. It is most probable that an extensive cave existed higher up the cliffs, which was washed away, and these bones were brought down with others by the waters into one of the many crevasses or ledges always to be found in the limestone strata.

Several of these bones, we are informed, will be lent by Mr. Jenkinson to the Weston Park Museum, where our readers can see for themselves these relics, which speak so plainly of vast changes in the physical geography of our own land.