12 



NEBRASKA ORNITHOLOGISTS UNION 



feathers. The wing membrane was very like that of the bat, which 

 does not signify weak flight, the bat being particularly agile on the wing; 

 though analogous to a bird's \^ang it is in no sense homologous. These 

 animals preyed upon lizards, birds, and probably on the small mammals 

 of the time. The other group of relatives is the Dinosauria or the 

 Ornithoscelida (bird-legged animals). They are so closely related that 

 the comparative osteologist fails to distinguish the separate bones of 

 dinosaurs from those of birds. They were at least intermediate between 

 reptiles and birds. Contemporaneous with the huge dinosaurs there 

 existed in this country many diminutive ones, some of them of arboreal 



9 10 



Six outline restorations of Pterodactyls, close relatives of birds, thought by some 

 to be the ancestors of birds. Modified, after Seeley. 



Fig. 6—RhamphocephaUis. John Phillips, 1§71. 

 Fig. 7—Rhainphorhynchus. O. C. Marsh, 1882. 

 Fig. 8—I!li<i„ij,horl>y)ichns. V. Zittel, 1882. 

 Fig. Q—Ornithof<tom<i. S. W. Williston, 1897. 

 Fig. 10— DiiiwiphudoH. Buckland, 1836. 

 Fig. li—Ornithocheints. H. G. Seeley, 1865. 



habits and scarcely to be distinguished from birds, the absence of 

 feathers constituting, as geologists think, the essential difference, 

 though this is a superficial rather than a fundamental distinction. 



While it is not possible or profitable to compare each, part by part, 

 nevertheless a series of skulls, skeletons, and restorations of the Orni- 

 thosauria, of the Orinthoscelida, and of birds, are submitted for com- 

 parison without description. In a like manner numerous examples of 

 the pelvis of typical individuals are figured for comparison, and atten- 

 tion is directed to the similarity of the pelvis of the Ratitae, especially 

 the Emeu and Dinornis, and that of the Saurischia (reptile-like pelvis) 



