NATURAL SCIENCE 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress 



j^o. 72— Vol. XII— FEBEUAEY 1898 



NOTES AND COMMENTS 



The Deep-sea Shaek, Chlamydoselache. 



MoEE than once lately we have alluded to the remarkably wide 

 and apparently uniform distribution of the fishes of the deep sea. 

 Still another interesting illustration of the fact has just been 

 published by Prof. E. Collett of Christiania, who has received the 

 largest known specimen of the eel-shaped frilled shark, Chlamy- 

 doselache, from a depth of about 150 fathoms in the Varanger 

 Fjord, northern Norway (Univcrsitetets Festslcrift, 1897). When 

 this remarkable shark was first discovered by Dr Samuel Garman 

 in 1884 among some fishes from the seas off Japan, it was at once 

 recognised by him as a very ancient form of life which must have 

 survived by taking refuge in the deep waters. The discovery thus 

 led to a long and animated discussion as to its nearest extinct 

 representatives ; and so far as the teeth were concerned, nothing 

 more similar could be found than the well-known fossils from the 

 Carboniferous rocks named Cladodus and Diplodus. Shortly after- 

 wards three more specimens of the same strange animal were 

 received by the British Museum from Japan, and these enabled Dr 

 Glinther to give some further account of its anatomy in his well- 

 known 'Challenger' volume on deep-sea fishes in 1887. The 

 general result was to prove a close relationship between Chlamy- 

 doselache and the more familiar existing primitive sharks termed 

 Notidanidae. Until 1890, however, the genus was known only 

 from the neighbourhood of Japan, and in that year zoologists 

 welcomed the interesting news of the discovery of a young specimen 

 by the Prince of Monaco in the seas off Madeira. Finally, in 1896 

 came the new and comparatively gigantic individual now described 

 by Prof. Collett ; and this is particularly interesting as having been 

 obtained in a sea so far north as latitude 69° 45'. Fossil teeth, 

 it may be added, prove that the shark lived in the Mediterranean 



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