116 Bashford Dean Memorial Volume 



glad to have the opportunity of expressing my thanks to Doctor Hyde for the great kindness 

 he showed me during my Cleveland visit. 



The collection in the Buffalo Museum, Buffalo, New York, includes some very well 

 preserved plates of Dinichthys gathered by Professor W. Bryant of Providence, Rhode 

 Island. I wish to express to him my gratitude for permission to describe and figure some 

 plates of his material. For the same privilege, I am obliged to Professor Charles Fish, 

 Director of the Buffalo Museum. For the privilege of studying the collection in the 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 

 I am grateful to Dr. H. C. Stetson. 



The majority of the photographs illustrating this work are by Mr. H. S. Rice of 

 the American Museum of Natural History. Two of the spinal plate from the Buffalo 

 Museum, are by Mr. Schneckenburger. All microphotographs and drawings are by the 

 author himself. 



DINICHTHYID MATERIAL 



The beautiful collection of Dinichthys fragments in the American Museum of 

 Natural History is mostly very old. The major part of it consists of Newberry's material, 

 including all the originals used in his works. This collection, the property of Columbia 

 University, has been kept on deposit in the American Museum since 1911. The rest of 

 the collection belongs to the American Museum and was partly bought from J. Terrell, 

 in 1901, and partly collected in 1914-15 by Doctors Hussakof and Bungart. The whole 

 collection consists of some hundred pieces of very different quality, ranging from nearly 

 complete head shields to the smallest indeterminable fragments of bone. All the speci- 

 mens of Dinichthys in the collection of the American Museum are from the Cleveland 

 shale of Ohio (Upper Devonian). 



The bones are usually preserved in concretions of hard, dark limestone. The fossils 

 themselves are also dark, nearly black, but microsection shows very well preserved bone 

 structure. One finds in the concretions mostly separate bones of the body carapace or 

 fragments of the head shield, and plates of the same individual are very seldom found 

 together. Moreover, as Hussakof (1905.1) writes: 



Some of the best material from the classical Ohio localities has been lost through the 

 vagaries of enthusiastic local collectors, who would detach from a concretion only the larger 

 plates, casting out all other parts, and then shuffle together the detached elements so that it is 

 well-nigh impossible to bring together again the parts from the same concretion. 



Becaiise of this, most of the remains of Dinichthys in the Museum's collection repre- 

 sent isolated plates of the body carapace of different individuals and some more or less 

 complete head shields. Both the head shield and the big body plates are for the most 

 part broken and crushed. Especially the larger and strongly curved plates such as the 

 median-dorsal, antero-lateral and the posterior part of the head shield, are greatly de- 

 stroyed by pressure. 



