in these ink-bags, for they contain the fluid which the living sepia emits in the moment of alarm; and might detail further evidence of their immediate burial, in the retention of the forms of these distended membranes (Pl. 29. Figs. 3—10.) since they would speedily have decayed, and have spilt their ink, had they been exposed but a few hours to decomposition in the water The animals must therefore have died suddenly, and been quickly buried in the sediment that formed the strata, in which their petrified ink and ink-bags are thus preserved. The preservation also of so fragile a substance as the pen of a Loligo, retaining traces even of its minutest fibres of growth, is not much less remarkable than the fossil condition of the ink-bags, and leads to similar conclusions.[1]
We learn from a recent Germari publication (Zeiten's Versteinerungen Württembergs. Stuttgart, 1832, Pl. 25 and Pl. 37,) that similar remains of pens and, ink-bags are of frequent occurrence in the Lias shale of Aalen and Boll.[2]
- ↑ We have elsewhere applied this line of argument to prove the sudden destruction and burial of the whose skeletons we find entire in the same Lias that contains the pens and ink-bags of Loligo. On the other hand, we have proofs of intervals between the depositions of the component strata of the Lias, in the fact, that many beds of this formation have become the repository of Coprolites, dispersed singly and irregularly at intervals far distant from one another, and at a distance from any entire skeletons of the Saurians, from which they were derived; and in the further fact, that those surfaces only of the Coprolites, which lay uppermost at the bottom of the sea, have often suffered partial destruction from the action of water before they were covered and protected by the muddy sediment that has afterwards permanently enveloped them. Further proof of the duration of time, during the intervals of the deposition of the Lias, is found in the innumerable multitudes of the shells of various Mollusks and Conchifers which had time to arrive at maturity, at the bottom of the sea, during the quiescent periods which intervened between the muddy invasions that destroyed, and buried suddenly the creatures inhabiting the waters, at the time and place of their arrival.
- ↑ As far as we can judge from the delineations and lines of the structure in Zeiten's plate, our species from Lyme Regis is the same with
