PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE GENUS DINORNTS. 375 



cranium could be better devised than that most singular development in breadth and 

 depth of the occipital region, which so extraordinarily characterizes the Dinornis? 



Amongst the endless diversity of the forms of the beak in birds, any indication of 

 that which would characterize the Dinornis, prior to its actual discovery, might well be 

 deemed a chance guess, and be valued accordingly. The approximation, however, to 

 the truth which is shown by the reduction of the figure of the actual head and beak of 

 Dinornis (PI. LIV. fig. 9) to the proportions of the hypothetical one {ib. fig. 8) pubhshed 

 in my Memoir of 1843 (vol. iii. pi. 30), may serve to show that such a prevision of 

 an unseen part, founded upon the laws of the correlation of animal structures, becomes, 

 by virtue of the nature of those grounds, something more than a mere guess. 



A general conclusion of another kind, and related to a high and important application 

 of philosophic zoology, may be deduced from the amount of agreement of the genera of 

 birds represented by the subjects of the present Memoir to forms of the class pecuhar 

 to New Zealand. 



The close affinity of the psittaceous genus to that which is peculiar to New Zealand 

 (^Nestor) has already been noticed. 



The Notornis in the form of the beak resembles a genus which has its species more 

 widely disseminated, but in the structure of the cranium it shows affinities to birds 

 peculiar to New Zealand, and I beheve I shall be able to show that by its sternum and 

 in the bones of its extremities it approaches most closely to the Brachypteryx. 



The Palapteryx is allied by some characters to the Apteryx, and by others to the 

 Dromaius. It is a peculiar genus of Struthionides , which takes in some respects an in- 

 termediate place between these two forms. 



The Dinornis, if it have no near ally in any known existing bird of New Zealand, 

 appears to have but little immediate affinity to any of the struthious or other known 

 birds in the rest of the world. 



Thus those concordances in the geographical distribution of existing and recently 

 extinct forms of the warm-blooded vertebrate classes which are illustrated by the remains 

 of Elephants, Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Hyaenas, large Bovine and Cervine species, 

 in the pleistocene deposits of Asia and Europe, — by the absence of these, and the pre- 

 sence of gigantic extinct Sloths, Anteaters and Armadillos, &c., in the coeval deposits 

 o( South America, — and which have been as strikingly elucidated by the recent discovery 

 of gigantic fossil Kangaroos, Wombats, and Dasyures in the bone-caves and freshwater 

 beds of Australia, — continue to receive as remarkable and conclusive additions by the 

 repeated discovery in the fluviatile deposits of New Zealand of the remains of gigantic 

 forms of bird, allied to those small species which still exist there and there alone. This 

 conformity of geographical localization of the extinct gigantic with the existing smaller 

 birds of New Zealand is the more striking when we remember that the Apteryx and 

 Brachypteryx constituted the highest representatives of the warm-blooded terrestrial 

 animals in the island, which, prior to the advent of Man, appears to have been destitute 



