In the summer of 1851 I had occasion to spend a day at the Albion Mines in the eastern part of Nova Scotia, and on arriving at the railway station in the afternoon, found myself somewhat too early for the train. By way of improving the time thus left on my hands, I betook myself to the examination of a large pile of rubbish, consisting of shale and ironstone from one of the pits, and in which I had previously found scales and teeth of fishes. In the blocks of hard carbonaceous shale and earthy coal, of which the pile chiefly consisted, scales, teeth and coprolites often appeared on the weathered ends and surfaces as whitish spots. In looking for these, I observed one of much greater size than usual on the edge of a block, and on splitting it open, found a large flattened skull, about six inches broad, the cranial bones of which remained entire on one side of the mass, while the palate and teeth, in several fragments, came away with the other half. Carefully trimming the larger specimen, and gathering all the smaller fragments, I packed them up as safely as possible, and returned from my little excursion much richer than I had hoped.
The specimen, on further examination, proved somewhat puzzling. I supposed it to be, most probably, the head of a large ganoid fish; but it seemed different from anything of this kind with which I could compare it; and at a distance from comparative anatomists, and without sufficient means of determination, I dared not refer it to anything higher in the animal scale. Hoping for further light, I packed it up with some other specimens, and sent it to the Secretary of the Geological Society of London, with an explanatory note as to its geological position, and requesting that it might be submitted to some one versed in such fossils. For a year or two, however, it remained as quietly in the Society's collection as if in its original bed in the coal mine, until attention having been attracted to such remains by the discoveries made by Sir Charles Lyell and myself in 1852, at the South Joggins, and published in 1853,[129] the Secretary or President of the Society re-discovered the specimen, and handed it to Sir Richard Owen, by whom it was described in December, 1853,[130] under the name of _Baphetes planiceps_, which may be interpreted the "flat-headed diving animal," in allusion to the flatness of the creature's skull, and the possibility that it may have been in the habit of diving.