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A fossil plant, like a petrified flower.

The appearance or figure of a tree or plant, as in minerals or fossils; a dendrite.

A fossil bird, of the Jurassic period, remarkable for having a long tapering tail of many vertebræ with feathers along each side, and jaws armed with teeth, with other reptilian characteristics.

A genus of fishes, some of which were eighteen or twenty feet long, found in a fossil state in the Old Red Sandstone. Hugh Miller.

A fossil plant from the coal formations of Europe and America, now regarded as the branchlets and foliage of calamites.

A radiated stone or fossil; star-stone. [Obs.] [Written also astrite and astrion.]

A cephalopod of the extinct genus Baculites, found fossil in the Cretaceous rocks. It is like an uncoiled ammonite.

A fossil balanoid shell.

A conical calcareous fossil, tapering to a point at the lower extremity, with a conical cavity at the other end, where it is ordinarily broken; but when perfect it contains a small chambered cone, called the phragmocone, prolonged, on one side, into a delicate concave blade; the thunderstone. It is the internal shell o…

A genus of fossil univalve shells, believed to belong to the Heteropoda, peculiar to the Paleozoic age.

One of the divisions of Crinoidea found fossil in paleozoic rocks; pentremites. They are so named on account of their budlike form.

shark (Zoöl.), the basking shark. -- Bone spavin. See under Spavin. -- Bone turquoise, fossil bone or tooth of a delicate blue color, sometimes used as an imitation of true turquoise. -- Bone whale (Zoöl.), a right whale. -- To be upon the bones of, to attack. [Obs.] -- To make no bones, to make no scruple; not to…

An old name for a fossil consisting of the petrified teeth and palatal bones of fishes belonging to the family of Pycnodonts (thick teeth), whose remains occur in the oölite and chalk formations; toadstone; -- so named from a notion that it was originally formed in the head of a toad.

erial, which is made into a button by covering it with cloth. [Written also buttonmould.] Fossil buttonmolds, joints of encrinites. See Encrinite.

A fossil plant of the coal formation, having the general form of plants of the modern Equiseta (the Horsetail or Scouring Rush family) but sometimes attaining the height of trees, and having the stem more or less woody within. See Acrogen, and Asterophyllite.

That may be calcined; as, a calcinable fossil.

A fossil echinus of the genus Cannulus; -- so called from its supposed resemblance to a cap.

A general term for a fossil fruit, nut, or seed.

A plume-shaped fossil, supposed to be a seaweed, characteristic of the lower Devonian rocks; as, the cauda galli grit. Gauda galli epoch (Geol.), an epoch at the begining of the Devonian age in eastern America, so named from the characteristic gritty sandstone marked with impressions of cauda galli. See the Diagram und…

, or part; a cavity. [Obs.] "The cave of the ear." Bacon. Cave bear (Zoöl.), a very large fossil bear (Ursus spelæus) similar to the grizzly bear, but large; common in European caves. -- Cave dweller, a savage of prehistoric times whose dwelling place was a cave. Tylor. -- Cave hyena (Zoöl.), a fossil hyena found abu…