8 THE GENESEE CONODONTS 
Ever since the first discovery of these fossils in 1856 by 
Doctor Christian Pander in the lower Silurian rocks near Petro- 
grad, Russia, there has been much speculation as to their zoological 
affinities. Dr. Pander himself believed them to be the teeth of 
sharks, in which view he was supported by Louis Agassiz. 
In the second volume of the Palaeontology of Ohio, Dr. J. S. 
Newberry, at that time the foremost American authority on 
fossil fishes, figured a number of Conodonts from the Cleveland 
shales under the provisional head of Marsipiobranchi1; and in 
discussing their relationship he quoted Prof. E. S. Morse and 
William Stimpson as of the opinion that they might belong to 
the progenitors of our living forms of mollusks, particularly the 
Nudibranches.* 
Dr. Newberry suggested that these objects might be the teeth 
of Cyclostomous ates and compared them with the teeth of 
Myxine and Bdellostoma. Prof. Huxley, to whom Dr. Hinde 
showed examples of Conodonts, concurred in this opinion. 
However, in 1889° Dr. Newberry adopted the current Annelid 
hypothesis saying that probably no one now believes that they 
are the teeth of fishes. 
The next discovery of Conodonts in America was that by 
Dr. George J. Hinde* who found them in the Chazy rocks on 
the Ottawa River; in the Cincinnati group near Toronto; in the 
Genesee and Portage shales near Buffalo, as well as in the Huron 
shales of Lambton County, Ontario, and of Kentucky. Dr. Hinde 
discovered and named the Conodont bed at Eighteen Mile Creek, 
“== referring it to the upper Hamilton but it is now known to be of 
“Genesee age. In his paper he figured and described one new 
genus and thirty-five species, mostly new. Owing to the difficulty 
of extracting his specimens from the matrix and their curiously 
twisted shapes he unfortunately, in several instances, described 
In 1912 the writer showed some of the more complex dental plates 
from the Conodont bed to Prof. Morse who said he did not believe 
they were the teeth of worms or mollusks, and thought they must 
belong to fishes. 
“U. S. Geological Survey, Monograph XVI. 
*““On Conodonts from the Chazy and Cincinnati Groups of the 
Cambro-Silurian and from the Hamilton and Genesee Shale Divisions 
of the Devonian, in Canada and the United States.” Quarterly Jour- 
nal, Geological Society, Vol. XXXV, p. 351, 1879. 
