Plagiostomata of the Pacific. Pt. I. Fam. Heterodontidae / by N. de Miklouho-Maclay and William Macleay.

  • Miklukho-Maklaĭ, Nikolaĭ Nikolaevich, 1846-1888.
Date:
[1878]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Plagiostomata of the Pacific. Pt. I. Fam. Heterodontidae / by N. de Miklouho-Maclay and William Macleay. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    With the exception of a few fishes of a Ganoid character, which appear in some of the upper Silurian strata, the Gestracionts, as they are named by Geologists, are the oldest of known Fishes. Teeth and spines resembling those of the Port Jackson Shark are abundant in the Devonian Rocks of Europe, and they are to be traced all through the Carboniferous and Permian Periods. They are found also throughout the whole of the Mesozoic or Secondary series of Rocks, but are most abundant during the Jurassic period. The teeth of another kind of Shark (Notidanus) occurs during the same period for the first time. It is noticeable, as has been observed by Palaeontologists, that the Jurassic Fauna and Flora of Western Europe were very similar to those of Australia at the present day. Among plants, Cycads and Araucaria; among fish, the Gestracionts ; among molluscs, Tri- gonia; and among mammals, Marsupials. It may be necessary here to give some explanation of our reasons for rejecting the term Gestracion of Cuvier, which has been extensively used by the most eminent Ichthyologists for many years, and for adopting Blainville’s name of Heterodontus, as used by Dumeril, in his Hist. Nat. des Poiss., tome 1, p. 423. The word Gestracion (from /cearpa, a pickaxe, and a^} a point), was first used by Klein, in 1742 (Missus tertius, p. 12), as a name for the hammer-headed shark (to which it seems pro- perly to apply), and is now used by Dumeril (Hist. Nat. des poiss. tome, 1, p. 380) to designate the sharks termed by Cuvier Zygaena. Cuvier has also (Regm. Anim. 1817, t. 11, p. 129) given the generic name Gestracion, without assigning any reason, to the Port Jackson shark, although Blainville (Nouv. Bull, des Sciences, p. 121) had a year previously (1816) given to that species the generic name JHeterodontus. It seems, then, that not only on the ground of priority, but from the meaning of the respective words, Dumeril is right in adopting Blainville’s nomenclature. As the family consists of one genus only, the characters of the group are given in the description of the genus. tH