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Devonian   Listen
adjective
Devonian  adj.  (Geol.) Of or pertaining to Devon or Devonshire in England; as, the Devonian rocks, period, or system.
Devonian age (Geol.), the age next older than the Carboniferous and later than the Silurian; called also the Age of fishes. The various strata of this age compose the Devonian formation or system, and include the old red sandstone of Great Britain. They contain, besides plants and numerous invertebrates, the bony portions of many large and remarkable fishes of extinct groups. See the Diagram under Geology.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Devonian" Quotes from Famous Books



... chalk; the St. Cassian beds exhibiting an abundant fauna of mixed mesozoic and palaeozoic types, in rocks of an epoch once supposed to be eminently poor in life; witness, lastly, the incessant disputes as to whether a given stratum shall be reckoned devonian or carboniferous, silurian or ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... for the feet); eating room; sitting room; reception room; storeroom; treasure-house; and at times a wash-house,—it is an epitome of the household's activities and a reflexion of the family's world-wide seafaring. Devonshire is the sea county—at every port the Devonian dialect. It is probably the pictures and reminders of the broad world which, by contrast, make Mrs ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... fossil history of the world are fishes; fish spines and placoid scales (compare dog-fish) appear in the Ordovician rocks. In the coal measures come the amphibia; and in the Permo-triassic strata, reptile-like mammals. In the Devonian rocks, which come between the Silurian and the coal measures, we find very plentiful remains of certain fish called the dipnoi, of which group three genera still survive; they display, in numberless features of their anatomy, transitional characters between true fish ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... is now becoming Devonian in character, of the softly pleasant aspect of the south, lines of hill occasionally rising into picturesque hummocky outline; wide troughed valleys richly timbered, with mellow old farmhouses here and there about ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... all its tillage is perhaps not worth more than English grass would be, thanks to that small-farm system much be-praised by some who know not wheat from turnips. Then along a road, which might be a Devon one, cut in the hill-side, through authentic "Devonian" slate, where the deep chocolate soil is lodged on the top of the upright strata, and a thick coat of moss and wood sedge clusters about the oak-scrub roots, round which the delicate and rare oak-fern mingles its fronds with great blue campanulas; ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... the local carrier—an outcrop of the early Devonian formation. It was Stalky who had invented his unlovely name. "He was pretty average drunk, or he wouldn't have done it. Rabbits-Eggs is a little shy of me, somehow. But I swore it was pax between us, and gave him a bob. He stopped ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... all local Devon men, so much of the dialogue in the book is in a strong Devonian accent, still to be heard in the outlying ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... elementary forms of growth, the cell and the crystal, wrestling for the mastery over each other in a life and death struggle. The moss is built up of cell, the rock of crystal forms. Below this Devonian limestone, its crystals sparkling in the sunshine, with its coral fossils, its fragments of crinoids, and its broken shells of brachiopods, down through the Devonian, the Silurian, the Ordovician, and the Cambrian rocks, down to the original crust formed ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... I will call the Devonian—it was noticeable that neither of them told his name—had both been brought up and seen the world in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and was closely followed by his mother. His sisters had ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson



Words linked to "Devonian" :   Age of Fishes, Devonian period, Paleozoic era, geological period, period



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