i67 



ON A BRITISH SPECIES OF MYRINA, WITH A NOTE 

 ON THE GENUS IDAS. 



By J. T. MARSHALL, 



Sevenoaks, Torquay. 



In the month of June last an Aberdeen trawl-boat brought into that 

 port the skull of a whale, which arrested the attention of Air. James 

 Simpson, an indefatigable collector of the MoUusca, who resides in 

 that city. When he went on board to examine it he found the skull 

 bare of flesh, but covered with an oily exudation caused by some days 

 exposure to a very hot sun, and although it was almost unapproachable 

 on account of the indescribable stench, he went close enough to 

 observe a number of "small mussels" clinging to it, and secured some 

 of them. He writes me that "there must have been thousands on 

 the skull, but by far the largest number were baby shells. The adults 

 were anchored by a byssus in the cavities, while the young swarmed 

 over the smooth surfaces. They were very much decomposed, so I 

 was glad to get rid of the animal matter as soon as possible." One of 

 the crew of the trawler, known to Mr. Simpson as a veracious man, at 

 once told him that the whale's skull was brought up in the trawl "on 

 the north edge of the Great Fisher Bank, about 150 miles N. E. of 

 Aberdeen, which would be nearly 100 miles east of the Orkneys, in 

 40 to 50 fathoms." 



Mr. Simpson having submitted some of these " mussels " for my 

 opinion, I at once saw they were unlike any species yet found in our 

 seas, and that they corresponded very closely indeed to the Mijrina of 

 H. and A. Adams, a genus founded on a single Japanese species. I 

 propose therefore to name this shell Mijrin'a simpsoni, after the 

 discoverer. That it is a native pf the British seas is placed beyond 

 doubt from the fact that, wherever the whale's skull may have come 

 from originally, it was trawled from the bottom, where it had sunk a 

 foot deep in the mud, the marks of which were plainly visible. The 

 Great Fisher Bank is practically a continuation of the Doggerbank, 

 and extends up the North Sea from the Firth of Tay to the extremity 

 of Caithness. 



The animal could not be described on account of the collapsed 

 condition the specimens were in. An attempt to soak one or two 

 that were dried up revealed nothing of any consistency except the 

 adductor muscles, which are unusually large and strong. 



