﻿460 Canadian Record of Science. 



shallow grooves between them. One of these ridges is 

 median, but the two lateral ones on each side are slightly 

 divergent, and a bilateral symmetry is very obvious. 



A considerable portion of the surface of each of these 

 fossils is obscured by a blackish and apparently bitu- 

 minous substance, so that it is difficult to trace any of 

 the lines of growth continuously, though they are remark- 

 ably well preserved in patches. Near the lateral margins 

 the incremental striae are simply concentric, but in the 

 median region (where they are fine, extremely numerous 

 and much more densely crowded than it is possible to 

 represent them in the figure, by this mode of repro- 

 duction), each one is produced anteriorly into an angular 

 and acutely pointed lobe, with its apex upon the summit 

 of the median ridge. From this fact it may be inferred 

 that the anterior margin of the dorsal side of the shell was 

 [)ointed in the middle when perfect. ' 



So far as the writer has been able to ascertain, there is 

 no known genus of Sepiidae, fossil or recent, to which 

 these fossils can be satisfactorily referred. They bear, no 

 < loubt, a certain general resemblance to the internal shells 

 of Sepia itself, but, in the sepiostaires of all the recent 

 species of that genus which the writer has been able 

 to examine, the radii of the dorsal surface are broad, 

 flattened and almost obsolete. As already suggested, they 

 seem to indicate a new genus and species of Sepiidae, for 

 which the name Actinosepia Canadensis may not be 

 inappropriate. In any case these fossils are the first well 

 marked remains of sepiostaires that have been found in a 

 fossil state in Canada. 



(This paper was read, and the specimens upon which it 

 was based were exhibited, on the 23rd of August, 1897, 

 in Section D (Zoology), at the Toronto meeting of the 



