g18 Marvels of the Universe 
Sandstone of Shropshire and Cheshire, as well as in the corresponding formations of Central India 
and elsewhere. . 
The Tuatera is, therefore, eminently entitled to the designation of “living fossil,’ which I have 
elsewhere proposed for such survivors from earlier periods of the earth’s history. 
In addition to its stout bodily form and spinal crest, the Tuatera is characterized externally by 
the generally dark olive colour, sprinkled with paler dots along the flanks, of its granular skin, as 
well as by the cat-like shape of the pupil of its brilliant eye. 
But the creature has yet another claim on our attention—and this of far greater import to the 
evolutionist. than any hitherto noticed—for deep down in the tissues of the brain is buried the 
rudiment of a cyclopean eye, which was, doubtless, functional in the Tuatera’s ancestors, the position 
of this so-called pineal eye being still indicated by a hole in the bones of the forehead of the modern 
Tuatera. Probably, indeed, all primitive vertebrate animals possessed such an eye, of which the 
vestiges are better preserved in the Tuatera than in any other living animal. 
Photo by] LW. S. Berridge, F.Z.S. 
THE TUATERA. 
The Tuatera might aptly be termed “‘a living fossil,’’ for it is the sole representative of an ancient group of reptiles which 
flourished in the age of the New Red Sandstone. It is, besides, notable for a rudimentary third or cyclopean eye situated 
deep down in the tissues of the brain. 
, 
Formerly the Tuatera, whose claim to a place among “ marvellous animals’ my readers will, I 
think, no longer doubt, was found on the New Zealand mainland, where it appears to have been 
mainly exterminated by pigs. On its present island home it stands in sore jeopardy at the hands of 
rapacious collectors, and it is only too probable that we shall ere long be shown the last of the 
Tuateras in a bottle in some museum ' 
CORALS F LS Jal 
BY W. P. PYCRAFT, F.Z.S. 
Amon those of us who have not had the good fortune to explore tropical and sub-tropical seas there 
is a general impression that fishes, in the matter of coloration, suffer considerably by comparison 
with, say, the birds. This impression is due partly to the fact that, with a few exceptions, our 
native fishes are lacking in striking colours, and partly because in our museums stuffed fishes, from 
whatever part of the world they may have come, are of the same uniform dull-brown hue. Yet, 
