The Pleistocene of North America / and its vertebrated animals from the states east of the Mississippi River and from the Canadian provinces east of longitude 95°

by Oliver Perry Hay

MASSACHUSETTS.

(Map [27].)

1. Orleans, Cape Cod.—In 1920 (Jour. Mamm., vol. I, pp. 161–164, figs. 1–3), Dr. G. M. Allen presented an account of the discovery of a maxilla containing the penultimate and the hindermost milk teeth of a calf of Bison bison, at Orleans, Cape Cod. This specimen had been collected about 20 years previously by Dr. A. W. Grabau and presented by him to the Boston Society of Natural History. The bone and teeth were found “wholly embedded in till about halfway up on a section of a glacial moraine, situated on Town Cove and about 70 or 80 feet high.” With the specimen were associated many fragments of the shells of the mollusk Venus. Dr. Allen suggested that this bison calf had either come to its end while wandering on the moraine or had more likely lived and died during the preceding Peoria interglacial stage. It might be questioned whether bones which had been buried and thereby become softened would have endured the rough treatment of a glacial mill.