86 Shufeldt, Posstl Birds' Eggs. fjnd'o'ct 



5, — " Fossil Egg." Cat. No. 6,497. St. Gerand de Puy, France. 

 Oligocene. Gift of Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, 1896. (See Plate 



v., fig. 13.) 



Mr. James W. Gidley, Curator of the Department of Fossil 

 Mammals and Fish, of the U.S. National Museum, assisted by the 

 late Mr. Wirt Tassin, Curator of Mineralogy of the Museum, had, 

 on a former occasion, made a careful examination of Nos. i and 2 

 of the above list. Mr. Gidley had made various sections of No. i, 

 compared them with similar sections made of the shell of an egg 

 of a specimen of Crex glohicera (from San Jose, Costa Rica), and 

 these sections were mounted on slides for microscopical examina- 

 tion. He had also made a series of micro-photographic enlarge- 

 ments from these, obtaining some valuable prints. So far as I 

 am aware, no chemical examinations were made of any part of 

 the specimens. Mr. Gidley very kindly turned all this important 

 material over to me, to be worked up and used in the present 

 article. He was, however, unable to find the aforesaid prints ; 

 but I soon made a complete series of others from his excellent 

 negatives, and these — or rather their reproductions — are here 

 shown on Plates II.-IV., figs. 5-11. 



On the afternoon of the i8th of May, 1915, at my home 

 (3,356 Eighteenth-street, Washington, D.C.), Mr. Gidley and I 

 carefully re-examined the aforesaid material with my high-power 

 microscope and other means. He came to the conclusion, in 

 which I concurred, that the specimen here shown in Plate I., 

 fig. 4, and Plate V., fig. 16 (No. 2 of the above list), was nothing 

 more than a quite clever imitation of a fossil bird's e^g, though 

 this by no means implies that the fraud was the work of the donor 

 of the specimen. While its external surface is very smooth and of 

 a rather light, earth-brown shade, it does not appear to be com- 

 posed of a fossil avian egg-shell. As far as I can judge, the 

 interior appears to be of a homogeneous material, of a stone-grey 

 colour, and heavy. Possibly it may be a concretion with its 

 external surface stained. It has the form of an ordinary hen's 

 egg, and there would be but little difficulty in finding one of the 

 latter with exactly the same form, size, and proportions. It may 

 be a clever cast of such an egg, ground smooth and subsequently 

 stained. In any event, I am of the opinion that it is not a fossil egg 

 of a bird, and its further examination (aside from a chemical one) 

 would bring nothing to light beyond what has been set forth 

 above. 



When we come to examine the specimen tabulated in the above 

 list as No. I, and shown upon three different views (figs. 1-3) on 

 Plate I., we have before us a very different kind of specimen, as 

 compared with the one last examined. In the first place, it is 

 a thoroughly fossilized specimen, and it has all the appearance of 

 the empty shell of a bird's egg, of about the size of the tgg of a 

 Cock-of-the-Plains, or Sage Cock {Centrocercus urophasiarms), that 

 had been crushed from side to side, filled with some fossilizable 

 material — the whole, as I say, having fossilized. Evidently the 



