The footprints of the Creator, or, The Asterolepis of Stromness / by Hugh Miller ; with a memoir of the author by Louis Agassiz.

  • Hugh Miller
Date:
[1850?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The footprints of the Creator, or, The Asterolepis of Stromness / by Hugh Miller ; with a memoir of the author by Louis Agassiz. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Resents the fragment found by Mr. Dick. The wu»rmaxillary bones, like the dermal plates of the lower jaw, were studded by star-like tubercles, and bristled thickly along their lower edges with the ichthyic teeth, flanked by teeth of the reptilian character. The opercules of the animal consisted, as in tl>» sturgeon, of single plates (fig. 35) of great snassiveness «nd size, thickly tubercled outside, with- «. ^ out trace of joint or suture, and marked on their under surface by channelled lines, that radiate, as in the other plates, from the centre of ossifica- tion. That space along the nape which intervened between the oper- eules, was occupied, as in the Dip- wwa »trarAo» or opb» terus and Ihpiopterxu, by three plates, which covered rather the anterior portion of the body than the posterior portion of the head, and which, in the restoration of Osteolepis, (fig. 13,) appear as the plates, 9, 9, 9. 1 can say scarce any thing regarding the lateral plates which lay between the intermaxillaries and the cranial buckler, and which exist in the Osteolepis, fig. 13, as the plates 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7; nor do I know how the snout terminated, save that in a very imperfect specimen it exhibits, as in the Dipiopterus and OiteolepiS) a rounded outline, and was set with teeth. That space comprised within the arch of jhe tower jaws, in which the hyoid bone and branehiostegous rays of the osseous fishes occui, was filled by a single plate of great size ana strength, and of singular form, (fig. 36 \] and to this plate, ex- isting as a steep ridge running along the centre of the interior aurface and thickening into a massy knob at the anterior \m mination, that nail-shaped organism, which I have describe** 10