SOME DEVONIC WORMS 



BY JOHN M. CLARKE 



Plates 27 and 28 



Though trails and tubes of Annelids are of sufficient frequency 

 in Paleozoic rocks to indicate the abundance of these creatures 

 from early Cambric time onward, yet the actual bodies of worms 

 have been so seldom reported that an additional discovery of 

 them seems to justify record. Paleozoic remains believed to be 

 Annelid bodies of errant worms have been described from the 

 Oincinnatian by Ulrich, and Ruedemann has recently given an 

 account of certain leechlike worms called Pontobdellopsis from 

 the Utica shale of New York. We have before us a series of 

 specimens taken from the upper Devonic of New York which 

 seem to us correctly interpreted as bodies of Chaetopod worms 

 directly allied to Aphrodite, the well known sea mouse of north 

 Atlantic coasts which we have had abundant opportunity to study 

 in its natural resorts. They have been collected from certain fine 

 grained felspathic argillaceous flagstones belonging to the final 

 phase of Portage sedimentation in the town of Italy, Yates 

 county, and in the Tannery gully at Naples, Ontario county. Of 

 one, whose structure seems rather the more puzzling, there is a 

 number of specimens, of which in two instances we have opposite 

 sides representing dorsal and ventral aspects, which it may be 

 here said are not greatly unlike because the tenuity of the body 

 substance save on the back has made the latter the predominant 

 expression. These are all from the former locality. Hasty 

 examination of these specimens might find in them a suggestive 

 resemblance to the loose, detached rays of short armed 

 Ophiurans. We call attention to this resemblance lest 

 the sapient critic fall into travail at this point. Another spe- 

 cies is represented by several clearly defined examples from 

 the Naples locality, where it is associated with P ar op- 

 son e ma cryptophyum and some other unusual species. 



The basis of comparison of these with existing Errant Annelids 

 lies in the apparent presence in both of a double series of trans- 

 verse scuta or hardened overlapping plates on the back. Such 

 structures are found among living Polychaete worms only in the 



