■Revieus — W. Dames — On Archceopteryx. 419 



Hermann von Meyer ^ as Archceopteryx lithographica ; but that this 

 Mngle feather had belonged to so remarkable a creature was never 

 imagined by any one. 



When a description of the nearly entire animal was sent by M. 

 Witte, of Hanover, and the late Dr. Oppel, to Dr. Andreas Wagner, 

 in 1861, that anatomist at once pronounced it to be a fossil Reptile, 

 and named it Griphosaurics ! " The subsequent discovery of a portion 

 of a maxillary or premaxillary bone bearing several small teeth, 

 imbedded close to the feathered fossil in the same slab,^ seemed to 

 lend confirmation to this view ; birds with teeth being then unknown. 



Thanks, however, to the later researches of Prof. 0. C. Marsh, 

 which have led to the discovery of no fewer than nine genera and 

 twenty species of toothed birds from the Middle Cretaceous of Kansas, 

 and Colorado, in North America,^ we now know that these earlier 

 birds wei'e all almost certainly furnished with teeth in both the 

 upper and lower mandibles. 



The absence of the complete head and of the neck in the original 

 specimen oi Archceopteryx described by Professor (now Sir Richard) 

 Owen' left of course much to be desired to be known further con- 

 cerning this singular Jurassic ornitholite. 



It created no small degree of excitement when in 1877 it became 

 known that a second example of this curious type of long-tailed 

 Bird had actually been discovered in the same Lithographic Stone 

 at Blumenberg near Eichstatt in Bavaria, and that it was offered 

 for sale for £1000! After some long delay, this rare ornithological 

 fossil has found a resting-place among the other palseontological 

 treasures of the Berlin Museum. 



It is a very fortunate circumstance that the parts which are want- 

 ing in the original Archceopteryx preserved in the British Museum 

 are present in the Berlin specimen, and that in the pelvis, the hind- 

 limbs and the more perfect tail we are enabled to add valuable 

 anatomical details to the Berlin example. 



Prof. Carl Vogt was one of the first to give a dissertation upon 

 the Berlin Archceopteryx, a summary of which appeared in the 

 Geological Magazine for 1881, p. 300. 



Professor H. G. Seeley, F.R S., contributed a further paper thereon 

 in the same year (op. cit. 1881, p. 454:), accompanied by a reduced 

 figure of the fossil (PI. XII.). Prof. 0. C. Marsh added some 



^ Palseontographica, vol. x. p. 53. 



^ Sitzungsberichte der Miinchner Akad. der "Wiss. 1861, p. 146. 



•* " On portions of a Cranium and of a Jaw in the Slab containin,^ the Archceo- 

 pteryx:" hy John Evans, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.. F.G.S., "Natural History 

 Eeview," July, 1865, p. 415. See also article on " Birds with Teeth," in Popular 

 Science Review, Oct. 1875, vol. xiv. No. 57, p. 337, pi. cxxv, by Dr. H. Woodward, 

 F.R.S., etc. 



* See ' ' Odontornithes, a Monograph on the Extinct Toothed Birds of North 

 America," by Prof. 0. C. Marsh, M.A., F.G.S., 1880. Eoyal 4to. pp. 202, Avith 

 34 plates and 40 woodcuts. 



* " On the Archceopteryx of von Meyer with a Description of the Fossil Remains 

 of a Long-tailed Species from the Lithographic Stone of Solenhofen," by Prof . Owen, 

 F.R.S. Read before the Ro)'al Society of London, 20th November, 1862, pub- 

 lished in Phil. Trans, for 1863, pp. 33—48, with four plates. 



