Fig. 101. Right dental plate of Myxine affinis.
Indeed, in deposits belonging to the Lower Silurian and Devonian, in Russia, England, and North America, minute, slender, pointed horny bodies, bent like a hook, with sharp opposite margins, have been found and described under the name of Conodonts. More frequently they possess an elongated basal portion, in which there is generally a larger tooth with rows of similar but smaller denticles on one or both sides of the larger tooth, according as this is central or at one end of the base. In other examples there is no prominent central tooth, but a series of more or less similar teeth is implanted on a straight or curved base. Modifications of these arrangements are very numerous, and many Palæontologists entertain still doubts whether the origin of these remains is not rather from Annelids and Mollusks than from Fishes.
[See G. J. Hinde, in “Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,” 1879.]
The first undeniable evidence of a fish, or, indeed, of a vertebrate animal, occurs in the Upper Silurian Rocks, in a bone-bed of the Downton sandstone, near Ludlow. It consists of compressed, slightly curved, ribbed spines, of less than two inches in length (Onchus); of small shagreen-scales (Thelodus); the fragment of a jaw-like bar with pluricuspid teeth (Plectrodus); the cephalic bucklers of what seems to be a species of Pteraspis; and, finally, the coprolitic bodies of phosphate and carbonate of lime, including recognisable remains of the Mollusks and Crinoids inhabiting the same waters. But no vertebra or other part of the skeleton has been found. The spines and scales seem to have belonged to the same kind of fish, which probably was a Plagiostome. It is quite uncertain whether or not the jaw (if it be the jaw of a fish[16]) belonged to the buckler-bearing Pteraspis, the position of which among Ganoids, with which it is generally associated, is open to doubt.
No detached undoubted tooth of a Plagiostome or Ganoid scale has been discovered in the Ludlow deposits: but so much is certain that those earliest remains in Palæozoic rocks belonged to fishes closely allied to forms occurring in greater abundance in the succeeding formation, the Devonian, where they are associated with undoubted Palæichthyes, Plagiostomes as well as Ganoids.
These fish-remains of the Devonian or Old Red Sandstone, can be determined with greater certainty. They consist of spines or the so-called Ichthyodorulites, which show sufficiently distinctive characters to be referred to several genera, one of them, Onchus, still surviving from the Silurian epoch. All these spines are believed to be those of Chondropterygians, to which order some pluricuspid teeth (Cladodus) from the Old Red Sandstone in the vicinity of St. Petersburg have been referred likewise.
The remains of the Ganoid fishes are in a much more perfect state of preservation, so that it is even possible to obtain a tolerably certain idea of the general appearance and habits of some of them, especially of such as were provided with hard carapaces, solid scales, and ordinary or bony fin-rays. A certain proportion of them, as might have been expected, remind us, with regard to external form, of Teleosteous fishes rather than of any of the few still existing Ganoid types; but it is contrary to all analogy and to all palæontological evidence to suppose that those fishes were, with regard to their internal structure, more nearly allied to Teleosteans than to Ganoids. If they were not true Ganoids, they may be justly supposed to have had the essential characters of Palæichthyes. Other forms exhibit even at that remote geological epoch so unmistakably the characteristics of existing Ganoids, that no one can entertain any doubt with regard to their place in the system. In none of these fishes is there any trace of vertebral segmentation.
The Palæichthyes of the Old Red Sandstone, the systematic position of which is still obscure, are the Cephalaspidæ from the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Great Britain and Eastern Canada; Pterichthys, Coccosteus, and Dinichthys: genera which have been combined in one group—Placodermi; and Acanthodes and allied genera, which combined numerous branchiostegals with chondropterygian spines and a shagreen-like dermal covering.
Among the other Devonian fishes (and they formed the majority) two types may be recognised, both of which are unmistakably Ganoids. The first approaches the still living Polypterus, with which some of the genera like Diplopterus singularly agree in the form and armature of the head, the lepidosis of the body, the lobate pectoral fins, and the termination of the vertebral column. Other genera, as Holoptychius, have cycloid scales; many have two dorsal fins (Holoptychius), and, instead of branchiostegals, jugular scutes; others one long dorsal confluent with the caudal (Phaneropleuron).