ANCIENT BIRDS 223 
giant birds were perhaps the most grotesque. An emu or a 
cassowary of the present day looks sufficiently strange by the side 
or ordinary birds; but “running birds” much larger than these 
flourished not so very long ago in New Zealand and Madagascar, 
and must at one time have inhabited areas now sunk below the 
ocean waves. 
The history of the discovery of these remarkable and truly 
gigantic birds in New Zealand, and the famous researches of 
Professor Owen, by which their structures have been made known, 
must now engage our attention. 
In the year 1839 Professor Owen exhibited, at a meeting of 
the Zoological Society, part of a thigh-bone, or femur, 6 inches in 
length, and 5} inches in its smallest circumference, with both 
extremities broken off. This bone of an unknown struthious bird 
was placed in his hands for examination, by Mr. Rule, with the 
statement that it was found in New Zealand, where the natives 
have a tradition that it belonged to a bird now extinct, to which 
they give the name Moa. Similar bones, it was said, were found 
buried on the banks of the rivers. 
A minute description of this bone was given by the professor, 
who pointed out the peculiar interest of this discovery on account 
of the remarkable character of the existing fauna of New Zealand, 
which still includes one of the most extraordinary birds of the 
struthious order (“running birds”), viz. the Apteryx, and also 
because of the close analogy which the event indicated by the 
present relic offers to the extinction of the Dodo in the island of 
Mauritius. On the strength of this one fragment he ventured to 
assert that there once lived in New Zealand a bird as large as the 
ostrich, and of the same order. This conclusion, which some 
naturalists strongly opposed at the time, was more than con- 
firmed by subsequent discoveries, which he anticipated; and 
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