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Bashford Dean Memorial Volume 



Text-figure 4. 

 A full-grown female Port Jackson Shark, Heterodontus phillipi, photographed from life. The four posterior 

 gill-slits, which were indistinct in the original, have been strengthened. 

 After Saville-Kent, 1897, p. 194. 



SYNONYMY 



The term Heterodontus has priority over Cestracion, having been used by Blainville 

 in 1816. The word means literally "different teeth", thus describing one of the most 

 striking characteristics of the genus (Text-figure 10, page 670). The word Cestracion was 

 first used by Klein, in 1742 and again in 1776, as a name for the Hammerhead Sharks, and 

 has since been used by Dumeril to designate the group of sharks termed, by Cuvier, 

 Zygaena. In 1817 Cuvier, without assigning any reason, gave the generic name Cestracion 

 to the Port Jackson Shark, the only living species of Bullhead Shark known at that time. 

 Presumably he did not know that Blainville, a year previously, had already given to that 

 species the generic name Heterodontus. Concerning the precise meaning of the name 

 Cestracion (from the Greek) there seems to be room for doubt. The matter is discussed 

 by Maclay and Macleay (1879) and by Carman (1913). 



The generic name Centracion was given to one of the Bullhead Sharks by Gray (1831) 

 in the first number of his "Zoological Miscellany" (p. 5). There he described a new species 

 named by him Centracion zebra. Gray did not explain his choice of the word Centracion, 

 and possibly the spelling was a mistake, for he wrote Cestracion instead of his own 

 term Centracion when, in 1851, he adopted the name Heterodontus for the genus. 



Garman (1913) followed Klein and also Dumeril in adopting Cestracion as the generic 

 name for the Hammerhead Sharks. In his choice of the name Centracion for the Bullhead 

 Sharks, Garman was not so fortunate. He objected to the name Heterodontus for the 

 reason that the word Heterodon, identical in derivation, had been applied by Latreille 

 (1802) to a group of reptiles. To the present writer this objection does not seem so 

 serious as the possibility that Centracion might be mistaken for Cestracion when these 



