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The number of corals, including bryozoa and zoantharia, obtained by me at Doue and other localities before adverted to, amounts to forty-three, as determined by Mr.
In its most calcareous form the Mountain Limestone is destitute of land- plants, and is loaded with marine remains the greater part, indeed, of the rock being made up bodily of crinoids, corals, and bryozoa with interspersed mollusca. Palaeozoic type of lamelliferous cup-shaped Coral. Order ZOANTHARIA RUGOSA, Milne Edwards and Jules Haime. a.
Order ZOANTHARIA APOROSA, M. Edwards and J. Haime. a. Parasmilia centralis, Mantell, sp. Vertical section; natural size. Upper Chalk, Gravesend. Cyathina Bowerbankii, Ed. and H. Transverse section, enlarged. Gault, Folkestone. In this coral the primary septa are a multiple of six.
At some places in the neighbourhood the softer mass is divided by thin flags of hard limestone, and bryozoa placed in the upright position in which they grew. From the abundance of these coralloid mollusca the lowest or White Crag obtained its popular name, but true corals, as now defined, or zoantharia, are very rare in this formation.
Its GENERIC characters appeared in other species earlier in the Silurian and continued through the Devonian. Its FAMILY characters, represented in different genera and species, range from the Ordovician to the close of the Paleozoic; while the characters which it shares with all its order, the Zoantharia, began in the Cambrian and are found in living species.
In like manner the fossil corals, or Zoantharia, six in number, which I obtained from Madeira, of the genera Astraea, Sarcinula, Hydnophora, were pronounced by Mr. Lonsdale to be forms foreign to the adjacent coasts, and agreeing with the fauna of a sea warmer than that now separating Madeira from the nearest part of the African coast.
Classes are so long- lived that most of those which are known from the earliest formations are represented by living forms, and no sub-kingdom has ever become extinct. Thus, to take an example from the stony corals, the ZOANTHARIA, the particular characters which constituted a certain SPECIES Facosites niagarensis of the order are confined to the Niagara series.
Some of the genera occurring fossil in Touraine, as the corals Astrea and Dendrophyllia, and the bryozoan Lunulites, have not been found in European seas north of the Mediterranean; nevertheless, the zoantharia of the faluns do not seem to indicate, on the whole, so warm a climate as would be inferred from the shells.
These various types of shrubbery were as big as trees in the temperate zones; in the damp shade between them, there were clustered actual bushes of moving flowers, hedges of zoophytes in which there grew stony coral striped with twisting furrows, yellowish sea anemone from the genus Caryophylia with translucent tentacles, plus anemone with grassy tufts from the genus Zoantharia; and to complete the illusion, minnows flitted from branch to branch like a swarm of hummingbirds, while there rose underfoot, like a covey of snipe, yellow fish from the genus Lepisocanthus with bristling jaws and sharp scales, flying gurnards, and pinecone fish.
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