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Updated: May 17, 2025
Since publishing my little volume I have got several new plates of Asterolepis, a broad palatal plate, covered with tubercles, considerably larger than those of the creature's external surface, a key-stone shaped plate, placed, when in situ, in advance of the little plate between the eyes, which form the head and face of the effigy in the centre of the buckler, and a side-plate, into which the condyloid processes of the lower jaw were articulated, and which exhibited the processes on which these hinged.
The mouth was furnished with two rows of teeth, the outer ones small and fish-like, the inner larger and with a reptilian character. The Asterolepis occurs also in the Devonian rocks of North America.
The tops of the southern cases display various fossil remains, including the head-bones of the asterolepis; the skull and antlers of the Irish elk; and various skulls of different kinds of oxen. The western wall case is filled with a curious collection of various fossil parts of an extinct species of rhinoceros found in this country, also skulls of the rhinoceros dug up in Siberia.
With the volumes I send also a few casts of my less fragile specimens of Asterolepis. Two of the number, those of the external and internal surfaces of the creature's cranial buckler, are really very curious combinations of plates, and when viewed in a slant light have a decidedly sculpturesque and not ungraceful effect.
In the genera Dipterus and Diplopterus, as Hugh Miller pointed out, and in several other of the fringe-finned genera, as in Gyroptychius and Glyptolepis, the two dorsals are placed far backward, or directly over the ventral and anal fins. The Asterolepis was a ganoid fish of gigantic dimensions.
The two other casts are of specimens of gill covers, which in the Asterolepis, as in the sturgeon, consisted each of a single plate.
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