QUATERNARY RESEARCH IN EAST ANGLIA AT THE HARRISON ZOOLOGICAL MUSEUM DAVID L.
HARRISON
T h e mainstream of research on mammals in the Harrison Zoological Museum has shifted during the last decade from purely Recent mammalogy to embrace the E u r o p e a n Quaternary mammal fauna. T h e purpose of this article is to outline the reasons for this change in policy and the benefits that are already flowing f r o m it. There seems little d o u b t that in the past mammalogists and palaeontologists have worked in separate disciplines, remaining blinkered to each other's advancing knowledge. A much more balanced view of the entities that we recognise as species is acquired if their zoogeographical history and evolution is studied in addition to the Variation present in their living descendants and their present ecology. T h e importance of this new approach has already been noted by Corbet (1984). T h e Q u a t e r n a r y has been a period of profound climatic change. Recent researches outlined by Sutcliffe (1985) have revealed that at least seventeen m a j o r cold-warm fluctuations of climate have occurred during the past two million or so years back to the Pliocene, averaging about one hundred thousand years each. Although we like to deceive ourseives that we are living in the Postglacial H o l o c e n e , there is every reason to believe that we are in fact in the Flandrian 'Interglacial' with further climatic changes yet to come. It should not be too surprising that the Pleistocene has been a time of extensive changes in mammal faunas, with great fluctuations in the geographica! ranges of many species and complete extinction of others. T h e argument rages on concerning the part played by man in the extinction of Pleistocene mammals. T h e disappearance of so many large mammals has been attributed to the 'Pleistocene Overkill' (Martin & Klein, 1984). It is clear however, that great ränge changes and extinctions also affected small mammals, none of which would have been systematically hunted by man. Their ranges changed, f u r t h e r m o r e , before the environment began to be severely affected by m a n ' s agricultural, urban and industrial activities during the Flandrian. No doubt hunting by man has been a m a j o r factor in the disappearance of many large Pleistocene mammals, but a much more balanced view of the whole story becomes possible if the small mammal faunas are also taken into account. T h e f a m o u s Pleistocene deposits of East Anglia provide a unique opportunity to conduct such a study and it is there that much of our research effort in this field is currently directed. It might be thought that such famous deposits as the Cromerian Freshwater Bed at West R u n t o n , Norfolk (type section for the C r o m e r i a n ) could no longer yield any surprises after well over a Century of study (Newton, 1882). Refined m e t h o d s of sieving the deposit, down to a mesh size of 0-5mm has, however, resulted in the recovery of some previously unknown species from the Freshwater B e d , including the Noctule
Trans. Suffolk
Nat. Soc. 22