Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/75

which want only feathers, a body which seems to have been as well adapted for passing through the air as the water, and a tail by which to steer. And yet there are none of the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone which less resemble anything that now exists than its Pterichthys. I fain wish I could communicate to the reader the feeling with which I contemplated my first-found specimen. It opened with a single blow of the hammer; and there, on a ground of light-coloured limestone, lay the effigy of a creature fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerfullooking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray or the sun-fish, and a long angular tail."— p. 70.

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Pterichthys or winged fish.

"Imagine the figure of a man rudely drawn in black on a grey ground, the head cut off by the shoulders, the arms spread at full, as in the attitude of swimming, the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from the chest downwards, one of the legs cut away at the hip joint, and the other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directly under the centre of the figure, which it seems to support. Such, at a first glance, is the appearance of the fossil. The body was of very considerable depth, perhaps little less deep proportionally from back to breast than the body of the tortoise; the under part was flat, the upper rose towards the centre into a roof-like ridge, and both under and upper were covered with a strong armour of bony plates, which, resembling more the plates of the tortoise than those of the crustacean, received their accessions of growth at the edges or sutures. The plates on the under side are divided by two lines of suture, which run, the one longitudinally through the centre of the body, the other transversely, also through the centre of it; and they would cut one another at right angles, were there not a lozenge-shaped plate inserted at the point where they would otherwise meet.—There are thus five plates on the lower or belly part of the animal. They are all thickly tuberculated outside with wart-like prominences; the inner present appearances indicative of a bony structure. The plates on the upper side are more numerous and more difficult to describe, just as it would be difficult to describe the forms of the various stones which compose the ribbed and pointed roof of a Gothic cathedral, the arched ridge or hump of the back requiring, in a somewhat similar way, a peculiar form and arrangement of plates. The apex of the ridge is covered by a strong hexagonal plate, fitted upon it like a cap or helmet, and which nearly corresponds in place to the flat central part of the under side. There runs around it a border of variously-