Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Belemnite
/ˈbɛləmnaɪt/noun
The bullet-shaped fossil guard of an extinct squid-like cephalopod of the Jurassic and Cretaceous.
The Greek roots
βέλεμνον
bélemnon
dart, javelin
-ίτης
-ítēs
connected with (stone suffix)
Literally: “dart stone”
The story of the word
Farmers who turned them up in ploughed fields called them thunderbolts, devil's fingers or elf candles and believed they fell during storms. The Greek βέλεμνον is a dart, which is what the fossil looks like, and it comes from βάλλειν, to throw, so the folklore and the name agree. Folk medicine ground them up for sore eyes and for ailing horses. The animal itself had ten arms with hooks and swam in shoals; the pointed guard was the counterweight in its tail.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
ballisticparabola
In a sentence
The beach at Whitby gives up belemnites after every storm.
A belemnite in the chalk is often the only fossil a field will yield.