PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE GENUS DINORNIS. 265 



dromaoides. The tibia of the Dinornis ingens' indicates that species to have attained 

 the height of nine feet. 



Comparison of the bones of the feet of the Dinornis with the American Ornithichnites. 



In 1836 Prof. Hitchcock' published his remarkable discovery of impressions in the 

 New Red Sandstone of the valley of the river Connecticut, Massachusetts, which he con- 

 ceived to be the foot-prints of birds, the largest belonging to a species with three toes, 

 surpassing the Ostrich in size. The epoch of these impressions is as ancient as that of 

 the Cheirotheria or Labyrinthodont footsteps in Europe, and more ancient than those of 

 the oolites and lias, from which the remains of our most extraordinary extinct reptiles 

 have been obtained : but no fossil bones of birds have been found associated with the 

 Labyrinthodont and Thecodont reptiles, nor with those of the lias or oolites, the Ptero- 

 dactyles of which were once mistaken for birds. The Wealden is the oldest formation in 

 which true ornitholithes have hitherto been discovered. The ancient foot-prints of the 

 Connecticut sandstones were for the most part supposed to be those of Grallfu ; but the 

 high geological antiquity of those sandstones, and the inferences which might be deduced 

 from the low character of the air-breathing animal creation, as indicated by fossil bones, 

 of the condition of the atmosphere during the deposition of the oolites, lias and new 

 red sandstones, led me to express a doubt in my report on British Fossil Reptiles 

 whether foot-prints alone were adequate to support the inference that the animals that 

 impressed them actually possessed the highly-developed respiratory organization of a 

 bird of flight'. One could hardly in fact venture to reconstruct in imagination the 

 stupendous bird which, on Dr. Hitchcock's hypothesis, must have left the impressions 

 called Ornithichnites giganteus ; for, before 1843, the only described rehc of the extinct 

 New Zealand bird did not warrant the supposition of a species larger than the Ostrich''. 

 The species of Dinornis, in fact, to which that relic belonged, we now know not to 

 have exceeded seven feet in height, which is the average stature of the Ostrich. But 

 the bones of the Dinornis giganteus subsequently acquired demonstrate the existence 

 at a comparatively recent period, of a bird whose tridactyle foot-prints, as will be pre- 

 sently shown, surpassed the Ornithichnites giganteus of Prof. Hitchcock. 



The length of this foot-print from its hind part to the extremity of the impression 

 of the claw of the middle toe is sixteen inches ; the breadth of the hind part is four 

 inches six lines. The toes were broad and thick, and we may plainly discern that the 

 bird supported itself, like the Ostrich, upon the under surface of the toes, from their 

 extremities to the cushion beneath the distal end of the proximal phalanges ; and that 

 in making the impression, the foot did not quite sink as far as the end of the metatarsal 

 bone. 



' PI- XXX. fig. 4. '- American Journal of Science and Arts, vol. xxix. No. 2. 



' Report on British Fossil Reptiles, Part II., Trans. British Association, 1841, p. 203. 

 < Zoological Proceedings, November 1839, p. 170. 



