THE 



aEOLOGIGAL MAGAZINE 



NEW SERIES. DECADE V. VOL. X. 



No. v.— MAY, 1913. 



OI^IG-I3Sr.A.L -A-K-TIOLES. 



I.— On some Bird Remains from the Upper Cretaceous of 

 Teanssylvania.^ 



By C. W. Andrews, D.Sc, F.E.S. (British Museum, Natural History). 



SO long ago as 1897 Baron Franz Nopcsa- recorded the discovery 

 of numerous bones of Dinosaurs and Chelonians in freshwater 

 deposits of Upper Cretaceous age at Szentpeterfalva in Transsylvania. 

 Since that time he has made extensive collections of bones from the 

 same locality and has published various papers concerning them. 

 In his last collection, now in the British Museum (N'atural History), 

 there occur some fragments of limb-bones which he does not consider 

 to be reptilian but rather of avian origin. ' These specimens he has 

 kindly submitted to me for determination and description, and they 

 form the subject of the present paper. 



The limb-bones of which portions have been obtained are the 

 femur and tibio-tarsus. The femur is represented by two imperfect 

 specimens : of these, one consists of the upper end and about the 

 proximal fourth of the shaft (Fig. 1), almost uncrushed and 

 altogether in a very good state of preservation ; the other includes 

 the upper end and the greater part of the shaft, but in this case the 

 bone has been much crushed and broken and the head and other 

 prominences considerably abraded. 



The head of the femur (A.) is large and would be nearly 

 hemispherical if it were not for the large circular fossa for the 

 attachment of the ligamentum teres (J.t.), situated rather towards 

 the posterior side of the head and looking inwards and backwards. 

 Yentrally the head is marked off by a well-defined groove, but above 

 its surface passes into that of the great trochanter {tr.), the two 

 being separated by a slight concavity onlj-. The head as a whole is 

 directed slightly upwards, rising a little above the trochanteric 

 surface. This latter is gently convex and roughly triangular in 

 outline, its most prominent angle projecting strongly forwards and 

 inwards. The posterior angle is less prominent and is truncated by 

 a deep muscle impression (o.m.), probably for the attachment of the 

 obturator muscles. Beneath the trochanteric surface the anterior 

 face of the bone is concave, the concavity being bounded above by 

 the rather prominent anterior edge of the trochanter, and externally 

 by a strongly developed forwardly directed ridge running down from 

 the antero-external angle. The lower end of this ridge is continued 



' Published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. 

 ^ Verhandl. d. k. k. geol. Eeichsanstalt (Vienna, 1897), p. 273. 



decade v.— vol. X.— no. v. 13 



