314 



Determinations and Descriptions of Species. 



FISHES. 



Teleostei. 



Veiy few remains of fishes appear to have been collected from the 

 Vancouver Cretaceous. The only indications of teleosts in these rocks 

 that the writer has seen, are portions of some small, deeply biconcave 

 vertebne, with long transverse processes, in two fragments of a concre- 

 tionary nodule from Hornby Island, collected by Mr. Harvey in 1894. 

 Dr. A. Smith Woodward, who has kindly examined these specimens, 

 writes as follows in regard to them, in a letter dated April 28, 1896 : — 

 "The group of small vertebrae, with very large transverse processes, and 

 completely pierced by the notochord, probably belongs to a member of 

 the Hoplopleuridfe (Dercetida^). I do not know of any other Cretaceous 

 vertebrae of the same kind." 



Selachii (Elasmobhanciiii). 



ASTEROSPONDYLIC VeRTEBRA. 



(Genus and species unknown). 

 Plate 44, tig. 1. 



A small concretionary nodule from the Puntledge or Coraox River, V. I., 

 collected by Mr. Harvey in 1892, proves to be formed around the calcified 

 centrum of one of the vertebne of a Selachian. This centrum, which is shal- 

 lowly biconcave, is a little over an inch in diameter, and marked by numer- 

 ous close-set, annular stride. It had such a distinctly X-shaped cleavage, 

 that, when the nodule containing it was broken, the centrum separated 

 into four flattened four-sided pyramids, which fi.t closely together, with 

 their apices inward. Natural casts of either of the concave surfaces of 

 this centrum are singularly like the upper valve of a Discina, and prove 

 to be precisely the same as the fossil from Ganges Harbour, on Salt 

 Spring or Admiralty Island, to which the name Discina Vancouverensis 

 was given in the second part of this volume. This name, therefore, will 

 have to be abandoned. In regard to the Comox River specimen. Dr. 

 Woodward writes as follows : " The larger vertebra seems to belong to 

 one of the Carchariidfe. We have some, generically undetermined, ex- 

 hibitinsr the same kind of fracture." 



