498 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE GENUS DINORNIS. 
the opportunity of inspecting the femur, tibia, and metatarse figured in Plates LKX XIX. 
and XC., of the natural size, which had been discovered in August, 1865, on the Glen- 
mark Estate of “Kermode & Co.,” about forty-five miles from Christchurch, Canter- 
bury Settlement, Middle Island, New Zealand. They were discovered, in the course of 
running a drain across a bog or swamp, about 4 feet below the surface, in such juxta 
position as to lead to the inference that they were bones of the same leg (the left); and 
their dimensions a little exceed those of the bones on which I had previously founded ° 
the variety or species Dinornis maximus. They are such, indeed, as to lead me to 
believe that the proposed specific term may be a safe one. I can hardly conceive 
that any bones as much larger than these as they are in comparison with Dinornis 
giganteus remain to be discovered in New Zealand—that land of these strange giants 
of the feathered class. 
To have evidence of a bird as large as the Ostrich of Africa, from so comparatively 
small a tract of territory, seemed to me in 1839 the most wonderful result of the deter- 
mination of the bone figured in plate 111, Volume IIT., of the ‘ Zoological Transactions.’ 
When I subsequently received a femur surpassing in length that of the struthioid 
species (Dinornis struthioides') by 2 inches, I called the species Dinornis ingens*; then 
receiving a femur of the length of 15 inches, with other leg-bones to match, I proposed 
for it the term Din. giganteus*. Leg-bones equalling those of Dinornis giganteus in 
length, but in all cases exceeding them in thickness, and from an island where bones 
of the true Dinornis giganteus have never been found, represent the species called 
Dinornis robustus*; and now, having almost exhausted the vocabulary of terms expres- 
sive of hugeness, I venture on the superlative for the species represented by the bones 
which form the subject of the present Memoir. 
Femur. (Plate LXXXIX. fig. 1.) 
This presents all the generic characters of that bone in Dinornis*. The roundness of 
the shaft, the thickness of the walls of the medullary cavity, the absence of pneumatic 
foramina, the thickness of the shaft, and breadth of the articular extremities, especially 
of the distal one, in proportion to the length of the bone, the tuberous “ line aspera ” 
on the back of the shaft (Pl. LXX XIX. fig. 1), the production of the anterior inter- 
muscular ridge from the lower end of the longitudinally extended thick and rugged 
pretrochanterian ridge, the rough, deep, well-defined fossa at the upper and fore part 
of the femoral shaft, the still deeper ecto-gastrocnemial fossa, and the very wide rotular 
channel—each and all of these Dinornithic characters of the avian femur are strongly 
marked in the present species. The surface, on the head of the femur, for the attach- 
' Trans. Zool. Soc, vol. iii. pl. 21. fig. 3. (Length 10.) * Thid. fig. 1. (Length 12.) 
* Thid. p. 250. (Length 15.) * Thid. vol. iv. pl. 1. fig. 1. (Length 14” 6’”.) 
5 Ibid. vol. iii. p. 247. 
