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XIV.— On Fossil Fish-remains collected by J. S. Flett, M.A., D.Sc, from the Old 

 Red Sandstone of Shetland. By Ramsay H. Traquair, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 

 (With Two Plates.) 



(Read March 18, 1901. MS. received May 8, 1908. Issued separately July 4, 1908.) 



Little has hitherto been known about the animal remains of the Old Red Sandstone 

 of Shetland. In 1858 Sir Roderick Murchison mentioned the occurrence, in flaggy beds 

 in the environs of Lerwick, of " the same little Crustacean (the Estheria) which occurs 

 at Thurso and Kirkwall."* Heddle in 1878 refers to the occurrence of fish-remains in 

 the rocks of the same region in the following terms : — -" Specimens of small fishes, 

 apparently acanthoides, were shown the writer ; these were imbedded in a brown 

 fine-grained muddy sandstone ; they were stated to occur in a quarry north of Gardie 

 in Bressay." f Again, in the same year, Sir A. Geikie, in his well-known paper on the 

 " Old Red Sandstone of Western Europe," states that Dr Heddle " informs me that he 

 was shown some ichthyolites (Coccosteus, etc.) in Bressay, which he was assured had 

 been found among the flagstones of that island. "| Unfortunately it does not appear 

 that any description of these specimens has ever been published, nor, so far as I am 

 aware, is their present whereabouts known. 



In 1898, however, Dr Flett obtained from the flagstones at Bressay some 

 fragments of undoubted dermal plates of fishes. In the following summer (1899), 

 aided by a grant from the Royal Society of London, the same investigator succeeded 

 in collecting from the same beds a larger number of these remains, which their finder 

 was so kind as to refer to me for study and description. These specimens, though still 

 very fragmentary, were nevertheless good enough, some of them, to afford a clue to 

 their genera ; and accordingly, in a brief notice which appeared in Nature of 

 November 23 of that year, it was announced that fragments referable to Holonema, 

 Newberry, and Asterolepis, Eichwald, had been identified by me among Dr Flett's 

 material. 



This was of great geological interest, as the first named genus has as yet been only 

 with certainty found in strata of Upper Devonian age, namely, in the " Chemung " 

 rocks of North America. Asterolepis, on the other hand, though well known in the 

 Upper Old Red of Scotland and Russia, is also not unknown in the Orcadian series 

 (Middle Old Red of Murchison), Dr Flett and Mr Spence having collected speci- 



* Quar. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xv., 1858, p. 413. 



t "On the Geognosy of Scotland. The Mainland of Shetland," Mineralog. Mag., vol. ii., No. 11, Dec. 1878, 

 p. 156, footnote. 



J Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. xxviii., 1878, p. 418. 



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