14 AN ACCOUNT OF A LARGE FOSSIL MARINE WORM. 



will guarantee a free pass to every Dipper that may hereafter cross our 

 path. 



Southcroft Govan, Glasgoiv, February^ 1851. 



AN ACCOUNT OF A LARGE FOSSIL MARINE 



WORM OCCURRING IN THE MOUNTAIN LIMESTONE 



DISTRICT, IN WENSLEYDALE, YORKSHIRE. 



BY EDWARD WOOD, ESQ. 



In the course of a series of rambles among the vallies and hills of the 

 Mountain Limestone district of the north of Yorkshire, undertaken during 

 short intervals of relaxation, with a view in the first place more especially 

 to geological subjects; in the second minor degree for the renovation of 

 health, lost in following more uninviting pursuits, our attention was drawn to 

 some specimens of flaggy rock, containing large and well-developed fossils, very 

 curious and hitherto but little noticed: they were brought from a quarry in 

 Wensleydale, called 'Tale Bank quarry,' to which we soon after contrived to 

 pay a visit. 



The quarryman, an intelligent specimen of his class — the Hugh Miller of 

 his district — was particularly well-informed on the subject of the local deposits, 

 and very much pleased to give any information upon them. 



The fossils in question, we found were obtained from a cutting carried deep 

 into the interior of the hill, not quite half way between Wensleybridge, and the 

 top of Middleham moor, and on the lowest slopes of Penhill: the bed was over 

 and underlaid by thick limestone deposits, and was apparently equivalent to the 

 flagstone beds placed by Phillips in his section of the hills about Hawcs, low 

 down in the middle group of the Yoredale series, and called by him "the 

 flagstone beds of Hawes." Its composition was a very finely laminated micaceous 

 sandstone, the superficial colour of each lamina being a dark gray, its fracture 

 lighter and slightly inclined to yellow; it contained two species of worm like 

 processes, one about an inch, the other less than a quarter of an inch in 

 circumference, and stretching in long contorted, but never convoluted folds, to 

 ^a gi-eat length, and laying in a depression in the flag to the depth of four 

 to five and sometimes more laminae, and impressed both on the upper and 

 lower surfaces of the beds. Many of the laminae were also marked with the 

 indentations which denote rain drops. Phillips, in his work on the geology 

 of the Mountain Limestone, mentions this or a similar bed in Covcrdale, as 

 having "a carbonaceous surface, impressed with traces of vermicular and ramified 

 markings."^ — "Often of clearly organic origin and indicating littoral deposition."f 

 But in the specimens before us, there is evident proof of more than mere 



* Page 44. t Pagt' 180. 



