VOL. XIX. (2) THE STORY OF OPHTOLEPIS DA MESH 
THE STORY OF OPHIOLEPIS DAM ESI I. 
BY 
&EORQE EMBRET.' 
In the early summer of 1874 I accompanied a number of 
the students attending my geology class at the Gloucester 
School of Science to the Garden Cliff at Westbury-on-Severn, 
and while there, one of them (the late John Sawyer) picked up 
a piece of black shale with a faint impression upon it which 
puzzled him. On close examination, we came to the conclusion 
that it was a fossil Star-fish and on the following day I took 
the specimen to Dr. Wright, of Cheltenham, who informed me 
that in the previous February he had received a similar speci- 
men from Herr Dames, of Berlin, and that he had named it 
Ophiolepis Damesii.'^ I asked Dr. Wright what were the 
characters upon which he had relied for fixing it as a new 
species, and he replied that the length of the rays equalled 
ten times the diameter of the disc, but in each of my specimens 
the ray had only a length equal to five times the diameter of 
the disc ; they were therefore not the same species as the 
Hildesheim specimens. 
During the later part of the summer, I made frequent 
visits to Garden Cliff and obtained a very large number of 
specimens. Ten of them I gave to the late W. C. Lucy, who 
presented several to the Museum of Geology, Jermyn Street, 
London ; others I forwarded to the Rev. P. B. Brodie, and a 
few to the late Jerome Harrison, at that time Curator of the 
Leicester Museum. Mr Harrison informed me that he had 
discovered the same fossil fifteen months earlier in the Rhaetic 
beds of Leicestershire. 
1 Expanded from remarks made at Garden Cliff, Westbury-on-Severn. September 14th, 1916. 
2 Dr Wright figured and described in his “ British Fossil Echinodermata 
of the Oolitic Formations” (Palaeontographical Society, t86.vi88o), vol. 2, pi. xxi., figs. 4 and 5, 
pp. 161-163. 
