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XI. On Divornis (Part XTX.): containing a Description of a Femur indicative of a new 
Genus of large Wingless Bird (Dromornis' australis, Owen) from a post-tertiary 
deposit in Queensland, Australia. By Professor Owen, F.R.S., F.LS., £e. 
Read June 4th, 1872. 
[Puates LXII. and LXIII.] 
IN 1836 Sir Thomas Mitchell, F.G.S., Surveyor-General of Australia, discovered in the 
breccia-cave of Wellington Valley a femur, wanting the lower end, mutilated and in- 
crusted with the red stalagmite of the cave, which I determined to belong to a large 
bird, probably, from its size, struthious or brevipennate, but not presenting characters 
which, at that time, justified me in suggesting closer affinities. Three views of this 
fossil, of rather less than half the natural size, formed the subject of pl. 32. figs. 12, 13, 
of my “ Paleontological Appendix” to Mitchell’s work’. 
The length of this fossil was 13 inches, the breadth of the middle of the shaft was 
not quite 3 inches. 
In 1869 the Rev. W. B. Clarke, F.G.S., Government Geologist of the Province of 
New South Wales, made known the interesting discovery of a femur, nearly 12 inches 
in length, during the digging of a well at Peak Downs, in Queensland’. 
The well was sunk through 30 feet of the black trappean alluvial soil common in 
that part of Australia, and then through 150 feet of drift pebbles and boulders, on one 
of which boulders (“at that depth,” 150 feet?) rested a short, thick femur, so filled 
with mineral matter (calc spar and iron pyrites) as to give the internal structure more 
the appearance of a reptilian than an ornithic bone‘. 
Mr. Clarke submitted this fossil to the able Curator of the Australian Museum, 
Sydney, and states that “ Mr. Krefft has compared it with a collection sent over from 
New Zealand by Dr. Haast, and has been enabled to determine it to be a bone 
belonging to Dinornis.” The communication is accordingly headed “ Dinornis, an 
Australian genus.” 
So exceptional an extension of New-Zealand forms of life to the Australian continent 
greatly added to my desire of further and more intimate acquaintance with this second 
evidence of a large extinct Australian bird—more especially as the femora of Dinornis 
received from New Zealand subsequently to the publication of Mitchell’s work led me 
to perceive, from the antero-posterior compression of the shaft and the sessile position 
of the head in the femur from the Wellington-Valley cavern, that it resembled that 
bone in the Emu rather than in the Dinornis. 
My wishes on this point, as on others connected with the paleontology of Australia, 
1 Spdpos, cursus, dpyis, avis. |? Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, vol. ii. 8vo, 1838. 
3 “ Dinornis, an Australian Genus,” Geological Magazine, vol. vi. (1869) p. 383, * Loc. cit. p. 383. 
