Crossword-Solution: BELEMNITES 10 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 14

Abundant illustrations of this truth will occur to every one who is familiar with palaeontology; none is more suitable than the case of the so-called _Belemnites._ In the early days of the study of fossils, this name was given to certain elongated stony bodies, ending at one extremity in a conical point, and truncated at the other, which were commonly reputed to be thunderbolts, and as such to have descended from the sky.

Among a great number of specimens of these Belemnites, however, it was soon observed that some showed a conical cavity at the blunt end; and, in still better preserved specimens, this cavity appeared to be divided into chambers by delicate saucer-shaped partitions, situated at regular intervals one above the other.

Now there is no mineral body which presents any structure comparable to this, and the conclusion suggested itself that the Belemnites must be the effects of causes other than those which are at work in inorganic nature.

These Belemnites flourished in prodigious abundance in the seas of the mesozoic, or secondary, age of the world's geological history; but no trace of them has been found in any of the tertiary deposits, and they appear to have died out towards the close of the mesozoic epoch.

There was a short time since a not very creditable discussion at a meeting of the Royal Society, where Owen fell foul of Mantell with fury and contempt about belemnites.