1. The fossil shell Gryphæa of the Oolite and Lias.
1677. Plot, Oxfordsh., 105. The petrified Concha oblonga crassa … found in Worcestershire, and there called Crow-stones, Crow-cups, or Egg-stones.
2. A kind of hard white flinty sandstone in the Yorkshire and Derbyshire coal-fields. Cf. CROW 10.
1778. J. Whitehurst, Orig. State of Earth, 163. These beds [strata incumbent on coal in Derbyshire] are more white and are commonly called crow-stone.
1811. Farey, Derbyshire, I. 179–80. The immediate floor of every coal seam within all this large district is … a peculiar kind of hard stone, called Crowstone, or Ganister.
1864. J. C. Atkinson, in Gentlem. Mag., 165 Celtic Kitchen-refuse-heap at Normanby in Cleveland.… The querns were formed, one … of the so-called white flint, or ‘crow-stone,’ of the neighbourhood [Cleveland].
3. ‘The top stone of the gable end of a house’ (Halliwell).
