Notes on the fish remains from the Bone Bed at Abden, near Kinghorn, Fife

Abstract

The bone bed to which I wish to call your attention to-night has long been known to geologists and local collectors for the abundant but fragmentary remains of fish which it contains. Although there has been much material obtained from it by different collectors (among whom I may mention Mr Stock, Mr Henderson, Mr Bennie, and Mr Gall), I believe that no systematic account has been written of the various species of fish whose remains occur in it; and I therefore hope that the following notes (though by no means exhaustive) may be of some use to local carboniferous palæontology. The only mention of this bed, with which I am acquainted, occurs in a Paper by the Rev. Thomas Brown, ‶On the Mountain Limestone and Lower Carboniferous Rocks of the Fifeshire Coasts,″ read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1861. That writer’s description of his discovery of this bone bed is so admirable that I am tempted to give an extract from it. Speaking of the section at Abden, he says, ‶Beginning at the top, and resolved that nothing should escape, I had nearly gone over the whole, when, about three inches above the lowest trap, I caught the glitter of a ganoid scale, and laying open the spot, a very slight effort disclosed a whole array of fish remains, spines, plates, teeth, scales, &c., in singular abundance. I was reminded of the famous bone bed of Ludlow, described as resembling a mass of broken beetles. This was obviously