Ch. XXV.] CARBONIFEROUS REPTILES. 505 



era, the absence of cold may have given rise (as at present in the seas 

 of the Bermudas, nnder the influence of the gulf-stream) to a very 

 wide geographical range of stone-building corals and shell-bearing 

 cuttle-fish, without its being necessary to call in the aid of tropical 

 heat. 



CARBONIFEROUS REPTILES. 



"Where we have evidence in a single coal-field, as in that of Nova 

 Scotia, or of South Wales, of fifty or even a hundred ancient forests 

 buried one above the other, with the roots of trees still in their origi- 

 nal position, and with some of the trunks still remaining erect, we are 

 apt to wonder that until the year 1844 no remains of contemporane- 

 ous air-breathing creatures should have been discovered. No verte- 

 bral ed animals mere highly organized than fish, no mammalia or 

 birds, no saurians, frogs, tortoises, or snakes were known in rocks of 

 such high antiquity. In the coal-fields of Europe mention has been 

 made of beetles, locusts, and a few other insects, but no land-shells 

 have even now been met with. Agassiz described in his great work 

 on fossil fishes more than one hundred and fifty species of ichthyo- 

 lites from the coal strata, ninety-four belonging to the families of 

 shark and ray, and fifty-eight to the class of ganoids. Some of these 

 fish are very remote in their organization from any now living, espe- 

 cially those of the family called Sauroid by Agassiz ; as Megalich- 

 thys, Holoptychius, and others, which were often 

 of great size, and all predaceous. Their oste- Fig. 556. 



ology, says M. Agassiz, reminds us in many re- 

 spects of the skeletons of saurian reptiles, both 

 by the close sutures of the bones of the skull, 

 their large conical teeth striated longitudinally, 

 (see fig. 556), the articulations of the spinous 

 processes with the vertebrae, and other charac- 

 ters. Yet they do not form a family interme- 

 diate between fish and reptiles, but are true 

 fish, though doubtless more highly organized 

 than any living fish.'* 



The annexed figure represents a large tooth 

 of the Holoptychius, found by Mr. Horner in 

 the Cannel coal of Fifeshire. This fish proba- 

 bly inhabited an estuary, like many of its con- 

 temporaries, and frequented both rivers and the Holoptychius mbberii, Ag. 



r 1 Fifeshire coal-field. 



SCa. Tooth ; natural size. 



At length, in 1844, the first skeleton of a 

 true reptile was announced from the coal of Munster-Appel in Rhen- 

 ish Bavaria, by H. von Meyer, under the name of Apateon 



* Agassiz, Poiss. Foss., vol. li. p. 88, &c. 



