NX) The Outline of Science 



finger, and they varied from the size of a sparrow to a spread of 

 over five feet. A soldering of the dorsal vertebra? as in our Fly- 

 ing Birds was an adaptation to striking the air with some force, 

 but as there is not more than a slight keel, if any, on the breast- 

 bone, it is unlikely that they could fly far. For we know from 

 our modern birds that the power of flight may be to some extent 

 gauged from the degree of development of the keel, which is sim- 

 ply a great ridge for the better insertion of the muscles of flight. 

 It is absent, of course, in the Running Birds, like the ostrich, 

 and it has degenerated in an interesting way in the burrow- 

 ing parrot (Stringops) and a few other birds that have "gone 

 back." 



The First Known Bird 



But the Jurassic is particularly memorable because its strata 

 have yielded two fine specimens of the first known bird, Archceo- 

 ptcryjc. These were entombed in the deposits which formed the 

 fine-grained lithographic stones of Bavaria, and practically every 

 bone in the body is preserved except the breast-bone. Even the 

 feathers have left their marks with distinctness. This oldest 

 known bird too far advanced to be the first bird was about the 

 size of a crow and was probably of arboreal habits. Of great inter- 

 est are its reptilian features, so pronounced that one cannot evade 

 the evolutionist suggestion. It had teeth in both jaws, which no 

 modern bird has; it had a long lizard-like tail, which no modern 

 bird has; it had claws on three fingers, and a sort of half-made 

 wing. That is to say, it does not show, what all modern birds 

 show, a fusion of half the wrist-bones with the whole of the palm- 

 bones, the well-known carpo-metacarpus bone which forms a 

 basis for the longest pinions. In many reptiles, such as Croco- 

 diles, there are peculiar bones running across the abdomen be- 

 neath the skin, the so-called "abdominal ribs," and it seems an 

 eloquent detail to find these represented in Archceopteryoc, the 

 earliest known bird. No modern bird shows any trace of them. 



