PALEONTOLOGIC CONTRIBUTIONS 83 



Serpulites McLeay, Sphenothallus Hall, Enchostoma Miller & 

 Gurley, Conularia Ruedemann and Torrellella Holm . 



The shales of the Paleozoic formations afford from time to time 

 quantities of long, flat-tubular bodies with thick tests of dark brown 

 to black glistening color and transversal wrinkling or growth-lines. 

 These bodies are especially common in the Canajoharie beds at 

 Menands and in the Utica shale at many localities, but they have 

 also been observed in the Clinton and in the Devonian and Car- 

 boniferous shales and limestones. A characteristic feature of 

 most of these wormlike tubes is that the margins appear as two 

 thick, solid welts. 



From considerable material that has accumulated in our 

 museum it would appear that these fossils have been described 

 under different names, according to the distance of the fragments 

 of the often extremely long tubes from the proximal point. The 

 proximal portions which are distinguished by an adhesion disk 

 have been described by Hall as Sphenothallus angusti- 

 f o l.i u s 1 under the supposition that they were plants. The distal 

 portions with parallel thickened margins have been figured and 

 described by Murchison 2 and referred to the worms as Ser- 

 pulites longissimus and d i s p a r . In 1893 Gerhard 

 Holm 3 erected for similar fossils the genus Torrellella and the 

 family Torellellidae, which he places alongside the Conularidae. 

 He characterizes the genus as follows : 



The shell strongly compressed, with elliptical transverse section, 

 very slowly tapering, sometimes almost tubuliform, but with the 

 apex acute, irregularly curved in two planes, or straight. The two 

 sides perfectly alike, so that a dorsal or a ventral side can not be 

 distinguished. The surface of the shell with generally feeble, 

 straight lines of growth only, so that the aperture has also been 

 straight. The shell, as to its chemical composition, mostly of 

 calcium phosphate, as to color, gray-violet, or brownish, or even 

 black, resembling the shell of Conularia. Septa wanting. Small 

 and narrow species. 



Holm describes two species, T. laevigata from the Lower 

 Cambrian, and T . taenia from the Ordovician. The latter is of 

 especial interest to us as it explains the marginal welts in our com- 

 pressed material, which from Holm's sections (see text fig. 33), 



1 Pal. of New York, 1 :26i. 1847. 



2 Sil. Syst, p. 700, t. 5, fig. I ; ib. Siluria, 4 ed., t. 16, fig. I. 



3 Sveriges Kambrisk-Siluriska Hyolithidae och Conularidae, in Sver. Geol. 

 Unders. Ser. C. Affh. och upps. No. 112, p. 146. 



