Pompeckj points out that while the Bajocian fauna of Cape Flora is without analogy in the arctic regions, it nevertheless presents distinct affinities to the Central European Jura, and especially resembles the Russian Callovian.
Moreover, this Jurassic collection from Cape Flora is of special importance in outlining the geographic distribution of that system. Pompeckj adds: “Hence the existence of a Bajocian sea in the north of the Eurasian Jura continent is proved beyond all doubt.... As early as the Bajocian period, there existed a Shetland Straits, which separated the Eurasian continent, existing through the Lias period until the end of the Bathonian, from the nearctic Jura continent.”
The comments relative to the transition of Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen, Franz Josef Land, and possibly Alaska, from land to sea and sea to land, are of marked interest, indicating as they do that large areas of polar regions were exposed in the mesozoic period to repeated and very considerable oscillations of the sea level.
The more interesting of the Jurassic fossils, found at Cape Flora, are shown in the accompanying illustration. Cadocera Nanseni (n. sp.), 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. Cadoceras, sp. ex. aff. Cad. Nanseni (n. sp.), 4. Cadoceras Tchefkini, d’Orb, 7. Cadoceras, sp. indet., 8. Quenstedoceras vertumnum, Sintzow, 9. Cadoceras Frearsi, d’Orb, 10. Macrocephalites, 11. Macrocephalites Koettlitzi, n. sp., 12.
The collections of fossil plants, made by Nansen in Franz Josef Land through the courtesy of the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, are of scientific value as indicating the fossil Jurassic flora of Franz Josef Land as compared with that of Spitzbergen. These collections fill in a not inconsiderable gap in the Arctic regions, and Nathorst’s investigations serve to confirm the opinions and statements made by Professor Heer, whose five volumes of Flora Fossilis Arctica constitute a monumental work. As is well known, research has established the fact that at one time Spitzbergen was covered with a luxuriant miocene vegetation—cypresses, birches, sequoiæ, oaks and planes. It moreover appears that this growth was coincident with the period when Spitzbergen, Greenland, Franz Josef Land and Nova Zembla experienced a continental climate.
Jurassic Fossils Found at Cape Flora.
As fossil collections accumulate, one appreciates more and more the masterly manner in which Heer summed up the results of polar exploration as regards Arctic vegetable paleontology. He was the first to present to the world a clear idea of the vegetation of the Cretaceous land, scarcely known to science until elucidated by him. It developed that in Heer’s time, among the fossil plants found in Spitzbergen alone were 7 ginkos, 8 pines, a short bamboo, 7 poplars, 3 maples and a fossil strawberry.
Dr. Nansen was fortunate in securing the co-operation of Prof. A. G. Nathorst in the examination of the fossil plants collected in Franz Josef Land, as he has devoted much time to the flora, present and past, of various portions of the Arctic regions, especially Spitzbergen and King Charles Land. Nathorst had the advantage of the notes of Newton, J. H. Steele and R. Curtis on the fossils of Franz Josef Land, published in the Quarterly Journal of Geological Science, London, vols. 53–54, 1897–1898.
Most unfortunately, the fossils were very fragmentary, the leaves in themselves small and often indistinguishable in color from the rock, so that their examination was made almost entirely under the magnifying lens. While the organic substance of the plants was sometimes still to be seen in a soft, brownish variety of rock, yet the harder yellowish varieties offered only impressions, or cavities, their organic substance having entirely disappeared. In cross fractures there were sometimes cavities which were complete transverse sections of coniferous leaves.