572 



ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1908. 



fore remarkable that typical representatives of the order have left 

 evidences of earlier existence than most modern types. Near the 

 commencement of the Tertiary epoch, in the sea which then covered 

 an area which is now surmounted by Mount Bolca in northern Italy, 

 an Antennariid laid wait for its pre}^, which consisted largely of 

 animals very different from any now living. So closely related, 

 indeed, was that Antennariid to living forms that it can scarcely be 

 distinguished generically from the species of Pteroj)hryne^ which is 

 now represented in almost all tropical and subtropical and even 

 temperate seas where the sargasso weed flourishes or is carried by 

 currents and winds; its relationship and characteristics were, how- 

 ever, long misunderstood, and consequently it was isolated as a 

 peculiar generic type — nhtionotopJwnis — without knowledge of its 

 relationship or distinctive characters. Contemporary with the An- 

 tennariid, as well as a cotenant of the same sea, was an angler that 



Fig. 5. — Skeleton of the Angler (Lophius piscatoriiis) . After Agassiz. 



no one has ever attempted to differentiate generically from the 

 common angler {Lophius piscatoi'ius) of the present northern At- 

 lantic ; * Lophius Tjrachysoinus is the universally accepted name of 

 the Eocene angler. 



The Famtlies of Pediculates. 



the lophiids. 



The Lophioid family is represented by the largest and best known 

 of the Pediculates, the angler of the books, better known to the 

 shoremen of the New England States as the " goose fish " and to 

 those of old England as the " fishing frog," " sea devil," and by 



°' It is not intended to deny that the fossil Lophiid may be generically dis- 

 tinct from the Lophius piscatorins, for it probably was, but the generic char- 

 acters of the modern forms are mostly osteological and not evident superficially. 

 It maj' be that the Eocene species was more related to Lophiomus or even con- 

 generic with it, for apparently it had a reduced number of vertebrae. 



