100 Papers from the Department of Marine Biology. 



about Cape Fear. The young are not infrequently taken in Beaufort 

 Harbor, though the adult is unknown there. So far as its habitat is 

 concerned, the northern barracuda seems to be a decidedly aberrant form. 

 Equally aberrant is the form found on the west coast of Africa. 

 Reeve reports (1912) that it goes up the Gambia River, 160 miles, to 

 McCarthy Island, where the water is perfectly fresh. He notes that 

 such specimens are very thin, and conjectures that they find it difficult 

 to get sufficient food. Whether this barracuda is the Sphyrcena jello 

 reported by Biittikofer for the Liberian coast, as elsewhere noted, can 

 not be said. 



FOSSIL FORMS. 



Our knowledge of the Sphyrsenidse far antedates the historic period ; 

 even Aristotle's mention of them is comparatively recent. In the Cre- 

 taceous seas which covered Kansas and the adjacent parts of the 

 Great Plains region, and in the bays and shallow sounds along the 

 North Carolina coast, there disported themselves in large numbers 

 certain fishes of powerful frame and voracious habits to which the 

 paleontologists have given the name Protosphyroenidce, the first 

 sphyrsenas. The generic name was assigned to these fishes by Leidy 

 as early as 1857, but it seems that Agassiz much earher than this had 

 examined the teeth of the same form and had erroneously placed their 

 owners among the Saurocephali. There is, it must be confessed, some 

 doubt about the affinities of these fishes. Indeed, Jordan (1905) says 

 "the jaws are armed with very strong teeth, as in the barracuda, 

 which however the species do not resemble in other respects." 



Two of these Protosphyrsena fish are known by the specific names of 

 Protosphyrcena nitida and perniciosa. Careful perusal of the Htera- 

 ture would probably give the names of a number of other species 

 referable to this fossil genus. However, it is not the purpose of the 

 present writer to go into the matter of fossil forms further than to call 

 to the attention of the reader the fact that the fossil Protosphyrsenids 

 are by many considered as the ancestors of the modern Sphyrsenids. 

 So FeHx (1890) seemed to think, and his figure of Protosphyrcena nitida, 

 reproduced herein as figure 25, plate vii, certainly does show the head 

 of a fish whose teeth and jaws are remarkably like those of the big 

 barracuda. Attention is called to the two great canines in front and to 

 the knife-shaped teeth of the upper and lower jaws. The teeth of the 

 upper jaw are seen outside those of the lower, but whether this is 

 natural or an artifact can not be said — possibly both, and rather cer- 

 tainly the latter, since the great canines are also found outside the 

 lower jaw-bone. However, from the drawing they seem to be rooted 

 in the premaxillary. 



Louis Agassiz (1843) also figures in the atlas to volume v of his 

 great work on fossil fishes two skeletons of certain fishes which he does 



