About 25 per cent of the shells of the Faluns are identical with existing species.
The Faluns occur in scattered patches, which are rarely more than 50 feet in thickness, and consist of sands and marls.
The faluns of the Loire first served, as already stated, as the type of the Miocene formations in Europe.
Professor Beyrich confines the term "Miocene" to those strata which agree in age with the falunsof Touraine, and he has proposed the term "Oligocene" for those older formations called Lower Miocene in this work.
So far as the shells of the Bolderberg are known, the proportion of recent species agrees with that in the faluns of Touraine, and the climate must have been warmer than that of the Coralline Crag of England.
The marine faluns of the valley of the Loire have been already described as resting in some places on a fresh-water tertiary limestone, fragments of which have been broken off and rolled on the shores and in the bed of the Miocene sea.
Some of these, near Bordeaux, coincide in age with the faluns of Touraine, already mentioned, but many of the species of shells are peculiar to the south.
This molasse comprises three divisions, of which the middle one is marine, and being closely related by its shells to the faluns of Touraine, may be classed as Upper Miocene.
Isolated masses of such faluns occur from near the mouth of the Loire, in the neighbourhood of Nantes, to as far inland as a district south of Tours.
The total number of species of testaceous mollusca from the faluns in my possession is 302, of which forty-five only, or fourteen per cent, were found by Mr. Wood to be common to the Suffolk Crag.
Like the faluns of Touraine, they contain the Deinotherium and Mastodon.
I formerly supposed them to belong to the same era as the Miocene faluns of Touraine; but, whether they may not rather be ascribed to the older Pliocene epoch is a question which farther inquiries and comparisons must determine.
French faluns are in the 47th; yet the forms of the American fossils would scarcely imply so warm a climate as must have prevailed in France, when the Miocene strata of Touraine originated.
In some places a decided agreement of the fossil fishes of the molasse and falunshas been observed.
The newest of these, like the Faluns of the Loire, have no true representatives, or exact chronological equivalents, in the British Isles.
From what was said in the two preceding chapters, it has already appeared that we have in England no true chronological representative of the Miocene faluns of the Loire, and none of the Upper Eocene group described in the last chapter.
Of ten species of zoophytes which I procured on the banks of the James River, two were identical with species of the Faluns of Touraine.
Among the former, helix turonensis (faluns Touraine) is the most abundant.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "faluns" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
