Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of a group of extinct squidlike cephalopod mollusks of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, having a cone-shaped internal shell.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A straight, solid, tapering, dart-shaped fossil, the internal bone or shell of a molluscous animal of the extinct family Belemnitidæ, common in the Chalk and Jurassic limestone.
  • noun The animal to which such a bone belonged.
  • noun Also called ceraunite.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Paleon.) A conical calcareous fossil, tapering to a point at the lower extremity, with a conical cavity at the other end, where it is ordinarily broken; but when perfect it contains a small chambered cone, called the phragmocone, prolonged, on one side, into a delicate concave blade; the thunderstone. It is the internal shell of a cephalopod related to the sepia, and belonging to an extinct family. The belemnites are found in rocks of the Jurassic and Cretaceous ages.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun paleontology An extinct group of Mesozoic marine cephalopod, very similar in many ways to the modern squid and closely related to the modern cuttlefish.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a conical calcareous fossil tapering to a point at one end and with a conical cavity at the other end containing (when unbroken) a small chambered phragmocone from the shell of any of numerous extinct cephalopods of the family Belemnitidae

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin belemnītēs, from Greek belemnon, dart; see gwelə- in Indo-European roots.]

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  • Usages on phragmocone and nucleus.

    September 8, 2008

  • The Cretaceous PeeDee Belemnite (fossil from the PeeDee formation in South Carolina) provided the original international reference standard for subsequent geochemical analyses and comparisons of delta 13C marine carbonate isotope ratios.

    June 7, 2010

  • Once thought to be fallen thunderbolts.

    (New Latin belemnītēs, from Greek belemnon, dart; see gwelə- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)) from etymolgy above - also see etymologies for parable, hyperbole, quell, and abulia for further references to gwelə-

    April 18, 2013