SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XVIII. No. 439 



SCIENCE; 



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THE MO A IN AUSTRALIA.' 



Recent discovery in Lord Howe's Island has proved that post-ter- 

 tiary Australia extended far to the east of its present shores. Still 

 it remains true that if among the results of inquiry into the past 

 phases of Australian life there be one suggestive of the possible 

 inter-relation of faunas apparently as distinct in history as in loca- 

 tion, it is the discovery of a bird identical with the nioas of New 

 Zealand, and of others so near akin to them as to have been par- 

 donably mistaken for them by acute observers. Fossils so like 

 moa bones as the latter must necessarily have been, clearly show 

 that the evolution of these grand birds was not initiated in their 

 recent island home, but that it had already made considerable 

 progress in that portion of a far-reaching continent which we now 

 name Australia, when a period was put to the Nototherian age by 

 desolating outflows of lava over the greater part of the land. 

 Having regard to the improbability of birds so organized effecting 

 a passage over sea under any ordinary circumstances, we can 

 hardly escape the further conclusion that New Zealand's entire 

 separation from the continental area was brought about in time 

 not more remote than that era of intense volcanic activity. One 

 is even tempted to surmise, and it appears very possible to do so 

 without absurdity, that it was one among the consequences of that 

 very manifestation of energy. But this is an instance of speaking 

 without book on a question which should be rigorously, as it may 

 be confidently, left for decision in the hands of New Zealand geol- 

 ogists. Cumulative evidence to the same effect, but still more 

 explicit in kind, is yielded by a relic of a true dinornis. From it 

 we gather that the process of evolution had, in the self-same place 

 and time, accomplished more than we could have justly antici- 

 pated without such warrant — the production of that more com- 

 plete departure from the rest of the Struthionidce which we rec- 

 ognize in the moa type. And again, as the " wolves" and " devils " 

 of Tasmania, the "crowned pigeons" of New Guinea, and the 

 "wallabies" of those and other Pacific islands, have been cut off 

 from the common ancestral seat of their genera, so also have the 

 moas. 



It is indeed somewhat strange that the notion of the same genus 

 of birds existing at one time in Australia and at a later period in 

 New Zealand should ever have been thought inadmissible, yet it 

 is difiacult to see what other conception of the case should have 

 been in the mind of Sir Richard Owen when he spoke of the ad- 

 vent of an Australian moa as "an exceptional extension of a New 

 Zealand genus to Australia." At the same time it is by no means 

 to be regretted that Owen did take this view, and that in conse- 

 quence he regarded with suspicion any Australian claim to moa 

 rank, however well accredited. It is to the stimulation of his 

 critical faculty by incredulity that we owe the full assurance that 



' By C. W. De Vis, M.A., in the New Zealand Journal of Science for May, 



there has existed a bird which, though not dinornis, had much in 

 it pertaining to dinornis, a degree of affinity which under the 

 circumstances could not have been overstated, but, as stated, is 

 quite sutHcient to show that Australia was the nursery of the 

 sept. 



But let us quit generalities for the more immediate object in 

 hand, viz., a brief review of the recorded occurrences of the moa 

 stock in Australian deposits. As if to excite a hope that such oc- 

 currences would be frequent, the first of all the extinct birds of 

 Australia to be drawn from those deposits and made known to 

 science was a strutbious bird dwariing in size not only existing 

 cassowaries and emus, but the emu which was contemporary with 

 it. A thigh-bone of this bird was discovered in the year 1836 by 

 Sir Thomas Mitchell in a brecchia cave in Wellington Valley, New 

 South Wales. It was examined by Sir Richard Owen, and figured 

 by him in an appendix to Mitchell's " Three Expeditions into the 

 Interior of Eastern Australia," 1838. At that time, as we are sub- 

 sequently informed, Owen determined the bone "to belong to a 

 large bird, probably from its size strutbious or brevipennate, but 

 not presenting in its femur characters which justified him in sug- 

 gesting closer affinities." The study of moa bones in after years 

 enable him, he says, to perceive that in some features of impor- 

 tance the cave femur " resembles that bone in the emu rather than 

 in dinornis." We learn further that "the length of this fossil 

 was 13 inches, the breadth of the middle of the shaft not quite 3 

 inches," — measui'ements which are noteworthy, as they render it 

 apparent that in its dilated proportions the bone was much more 

 like the dinornis femur than that of the emu, which has a breadth, 

 of only IJ inches to a length of 8f inches. 



Thirty-three years elapsed before any further light was thrown 

 upon a problem which was sufficiently obscure. It then issued 

 from the Peak Downs, near the centre of Queensland, where in 

 1869 a well was being sunk. The workmen passed through thirty 

 feet of the residuum of basaltic decomposition, the " black soil" 

 characteristic of " downs" country, then through 1.50 feet of drift 

 pebbles and bowlders. Lying on one of the bowlders, at 180 feet 

 from the surface, they met with a short thick femur, whicb was 

 happily preserved from the usual fate experienced by such finds, 

 and, more happily, passed into the hands of the well-known geo- 

 logist, the Rev. W. B. Clarke. In concert with Mr. G. Krefft, 

 then curator of the Australian Museum, Mr. Clarke compared 

 it with the moa bones, with the result that he felt himself 

 justified in announcing the discovery in the Geological Maga- 

 zine of that year in a letter entitled, ' ' Dinornis an Australian 

 Genus." At Sir R. Owen's solicitation a cast of this bone was sent 

 to him by the trustees of the Australian Museum, and this, in 

 1873, formed the subject of a communication from Owen to the 

 Geographical Society. After pointing out at length the characters 

 in which this femur resembles dinornis and dromeeus (emu) re- 

 spectively, the examiner decides " that in its essential characters 

 it resembles more that bone in the emu than in the moa, and that 

 the characters in which it more resembles dinornis are concomitant 

 with and related to the more general strength and robustness of 

 the bone, from which we may infer that the species manifested 

 dinornithio strength and proportions of the hind limbs combined 

 with characters of closer affinity to the existing more slender 

 limbed and swifter wingless bird peculiar to the Australian conti- 

 nent." To the bird represented by the fossil Owen gave the name 

 " dromornis," a name significant of his conception of the para- 

 mount affinity displayed by its femur. If with that judgment a 

 succeeding observer finds it impossible to completely harmonize 

 his own conclusion, and says so, it is because in this case compul- 

 sion rides rough-shod over peril. That the dromornis bone has 

 important features which relate it to the emu rather than to the 

 moa is a position which is unassailable, but that these alone are 

 its " essential " characters is a postulate, and one that has no right 

 to command assent. Essential they are among the dromsean 

 features of the bone ; but of the compound dromornis bone as a 

 whole they form but a part of the essentials. The absence of the 

 air-duct communicating with the interior of the bone, a charac- 

 teristic dinornithic feature, seems quite as important as a structural 

 index to habit as the drorasean set of the head of the bone ; and, 

 being strictly dinorthic, it is not "related to the general strength 



