In these beds a great
number of the Lower Miocene plants of Switzerland have been discovered.
LOWER MIOCENE OF ENGLAND-- HEMPSTEAD BEDS.
We have already stated that the Upper Miocene formation is nowhere represented
in the British Isles; but strata referable to the Lower Miocene period are found
both in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In the Hampshire basin these occupy a
very small superficial area, having been discovered by the late Edward Forbes at
Hempstead near Yarmouth, in the northern part of the Isle of Wight, where they
are 170 feet thick, and rich in characteristic marine shells. They overlie the
uppermost of an extensive series of Eocene deposits of marine, brackish, and
fresh-water formations, which rest on the Chalk and terminate upward in strata
corresponding in age to the Paris gypsum, and containing the same extinct genera
of quadrupeds, Palaeotherium, Anoplotherium, and others which Cuvier first
described. The following is the succession of these Lower Miocene strata, most
of them exposed in a cliff east of Yarmouth:
(FIGURE 158. Corbula pisum. Hempstead Beds, Isle of Wight.
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