6 THE GENESEE CONODONTS 
seneer’ has denied that the Devonian Styliola has any affinities 
with straight shelled Pteropods, which he claims are specialized 
forms derived from coiled ancestors and first appear in the 
Tertiary. Later authorities, however, do not accept this 
conclusion. 
The lower member, an impure phosphatic and fragmental lime- 
stone, named many years ago by Hinde “the Conodont bed,” 
attains a maximum thickness of four or five inches at the point 
of emergence from the creek bed and apparently thins out in 
every direction. Wherever it has been found out-cropping in 
other localities in the vicinity it apparently occurs only in thin 
patches or lenticular layers. The rock is in fact the remains of 
an ancient sandbar and is composed of water-worn quartz grains, 
Crinoid stems and other fragmental material; with pyrite, a very 
few invertebrates, an enormous number of Conodonts and the 
osseous plates and teeth of fishes. 
On turning over a slab of this rock, its sandbar nature is well 
shown. The heavier material has worked to the bottom, and 
there in relief are to be seen Crinoid stems, water-worn pebbles 
sometimes two inches in diameter ; together with the disarticulated 
remains of arthrodires, the teeth of sharks and ganoids and occa- 
sional fragments of driftwood. One such slab collected by the 
writer measures only 11” x 18” and yet contains the remains of 
eight species of fishes together with numerous water-worn peb- 
bles. All this, together with the great quantity of rhizocarps in 
the thin shale coating the surface of the beds and sometimes 
included within them, indicates shallow water conditions with 
land in the near vicinity. Some of the rock shows evidence of 
cross-bedding. 
The variety of fish remains contained in the Conodont bed is 
remarkable, the writer having collected from one small exposure 
bones, teeth and spines representing twenty-seven genera and 
forty species. It is thus one of the richest and most interesting 
storehouses of ancient vertebrate life to be found anywhere in 
the world. Fig. 2 is a photograph showing the Genundewah 
limestone and Conodont bed in Eighteen Mile Creek. Under- 
neath is seen the Moscow shale with its concretionary layer. 
‘Report on the Pteropods. Voyage of H. M. S. Challenger, Zoology. 
Vol. XXIII. 
