Some account of the fossil remains of an animal more nearly allied to fishes than any of the other classes of animals / by Sir Everard Home.

  • Home, Everard, Sir, 1756-1832.
Date:
1814
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some account of the fossil remains of an animal more nearly allied to fishes than any of the other classes of animals / by Sir Everard Home. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    This branch of comparative anatomy not only brings to our knowledge races of animals very different from those with which we are acquainted, but supplies intermediate links in the gradation of structure, by means of which the different classes will probably be found so imperceptibly to run into one another, that they will no longer be accounted distinct, but only portions of one series, and show that the whole of the animal creation forms a regular and connected chain. The fossil remains of animals are too frequently brought under our observation in a very mutilated state; or are so intimately connected with tlie substances in which they are deposited, that it is difficult to make out the figure of the bones. In the present instance, the pains that have be^n taken, and the skill which has been exerted in removing the surrounding stone, under the superintendance of Mr. Bullock, in whose Museum of Natural History the specimen is preserved, have brought the parts distinctly into view. This specimen was found upon an estate of Henry Host Henley, Esq. between Lyme and Charmouth, in Dorsetshire, in a cliff’thirty or forty feet above the level of the sea-shore. It had been throwm down by the breaking off of a part of the cliff', and buried in the sand upon the shore, to the depth of nearly two feet. The skull was dug out in 1812, the other parts in the following year, at a distance of some feet. The cliff is composed of that species of argillaceous lime- stone called blue lias, in which the fossil bones w’ere deposited. Above the lias there is only a thin la}^er of black earth. The figure and appearance of the fossil bones are so accu- rately shewn in the annexed drawings, (Plates xvii. xviii. xix. XX.] as to make a very particular description ofthem unnecessary.