Edward Wilson — Type Fossils in the Bristol Museum. 363 



VI. — Fossil Types in the Bristol Museum. 



By E. Wilson, F.G.S.; 

 Curator of the Bristol Museum. 



OF " those precious specimens called ' types ' which must be 

 appealed to through all time to determine the species to which 

 a name was originally given," 1 Bristol Museum contains one hundi-ed 

 and eighty six distinct fossil forms. With the exception of a single 

 Coal-measure plant, these are all the remains of animals, ranging 

 in the zoological scale from the Beptilia to the Actinozoa, and 

 stratigraphically from the Silurian to the Cretaceous epochs. 



Many of these types possess for the student of British palaeon- 

 tology a very high interest, not only on account of the remarkable 

 nature of the fossils themselves, but also from the fact of their 

 having been described by some of the most distinguished of 

 palaeontologists. Amongst the " historic types " in the Bristol 

 Museum may be specially noticed the following: The "types" 

 described by Louis Agassiz in his great work the " Poissons 

 Fossiles," comprising the teeth and fin-spines of Selachian fishes 

 from the lower beds of the Carboniferous Limestone of the Avon 

 Gorge near Bristol, the teeth of the original Ceratodi from the 

 Rhaetic " bone-bed " of Aust Cliff on Severn, and some interesting 

 Jurassic fishes from various localities. The remarkable and indeed 

 unique British series of reptilian remains derived from the Upper 

 Triassic conglomerates fringing the Durdham Down at Redland, 

 Bristol, originally described by Messrs. Biley and Stutchbury in 

 the Transactions, and also more recently by Huxley in the Quar- 

 terly Journal of the Geological Society of London, under the generic 

 names Thecodoniosaurus and Palceosaurns, but in regard to which we 

 have yet much to learn. And a considerable portion of the Mollusca, 

 etc., from the Upper Greensand of Blackdown, Devon, described by 

 James de Carle Sowerby in Dr. Fitton's Memoir " On the Strata 

 between the Chalk and the Oxford Oolite in the South-east of 

 England." 



Of the " fossil types " in the Bristol Museum which have been 

 determined in more recent years may be mentioned : That remark- 

 ably rich and varied series of the teeth of Ceratodus, 350 in number, 

 collected from the Rhaetic " bone-bed " of Aust Cliff by the inde- 

 fatigable Biggins, and acquired for this Museum through the 

 liberality of a number of friends and patrons of the Institution 

 in the year 1873; the Inferior Oolite Gasteropoda from Dundry 

 and Dorsetshire, so admirably described by the late Mr. E. B. 

 Tawney, a former Curator of this Museum, in the Proceedings of 

 the Bristol Naturalists' Society ; a series of Inferior Oolite Pelecypoda 

 ably described by the Kev. G. F. Whidborne ; and a series of Upper 

 Silurian Mollusca from Rhymney, near Cardiff, by Professor W. J. 

 Sollas, in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. 



1 W. H. Flower, LL.D., F.R.S., Presidential Address to the British Association 

 for the Advancement of Science, Newcastle, 1889. 



