BIRDS OF OLD 55 



In the Jurassic, then, when the Dinosaurs were the 

 lords of the earth and small mammals just beginning to 

 appear, we come upon traces of full-fledged birds. The 

 first intimation of their presence was the imprint of a 

 single feather found in that ancient treasure-house, the 

 Solenhofen quarries; but as Hercules was revealed 

 by his foot, so the bird was made evident by the feather 

 whose discovery was announced August 15, 1861. And 

 a little later, in September of the same year, the bird 

 itself turned up, and in 1877 a second specimen was 

 found, the two representing two species, if not two 

 distinct genera. These were very different from any 

 birds now living so different, indeed, and bearing 

 such evident traces of their reptilian ancestry, that it is 

 necessary to place them apart from other animals in a 

 separate division of the class birds. 



Archseopteryx was considerably smaller than a crow, 

 with a stout little head armed with sharp teeth (as 

 scarce as hens' teeth was no joke in that distant period), 

 while as he fluttered through the air he trailed after 

 him a tail longer than his body, beset with feathers on 

 either side. Everyone knows that nowadays the feath- 

 ers of a bird's tail are arranged like the sticks of a fan, 

 and that the tail opens and shuts like a fan. But in 

 Archseopteryx the feathers were arranged in pairs, a 

 feather on each side of every joint of the tail, so that on a 

 small scale the tail was something like that of a kite; 

 and because of this long, lizard-like tail this bird and his 

 immediate kith and kin are placed in a group dubbed 

 Saurur^, or lizard tailed. 



Because impressions of feathers are not found all 

 around these specimens some have thought that they 

 were confined to certain portions of the body the 

 wings, tail, and thighs the other parts being naked. 

 There seems, however, no good reason to suppose that 



