Rare and new ostracoderm fishes from the Downtonian of Shropshire

Extract. The fossils which form the subject of this paper were collected in the summers of 1933 and 1934 by my son and myself at Earnstrey Hall Farm on the western slopes of Brown Clee in Shropshire. I had become interested in specimens collected at this locality by Mr W. Wickham King, M.Sc, which Sir Arthur Smith Woodward (1934, p. 566) named Corvaspis, and it was with the intention of obtaining further material of this genus that I got King to tell me exactly where he had found the best of his specimens. The section is in a small stream course 570 yards north 11° east of the farm and at the bottom of the escarpment formed by the “Psammosteus Limestone” and in the beds assigned to Zone I, 8 of King's classification (King, 1925). At the particular spot in question there is (in normal years) a waterfall over a 4-foot band of very tough calcareous pellet rock and conglomerate with occasional quartz pebbles up to about 1 inch diameter. This, especially its lowest few inches, had yielded the specimens that King had found, and from it we also collected abundant fragments of Corvaspis. Nearly all the specimens of Phialaspis (p. 439) which we discovered came from this rock, as did a fine example given by King to the British Museum and referred to later (p. 440). In 1934 the same rock yielded cf. Ctenaspis. Below this rock there is about 18 inches of grey shale, in which King had noted black streaks. This rests on several feet of red clay.