496 HARRY GOVIER SEELEY ON THE 



53. On the British Fossil Cretaceous Birds. By Harry Govier 

 Seeley, Esq., P.L.S., F.G.S., Professor of Geography in King's 

 College, London. (Read June 7, 1876.) 



[Plates XXVI., XXVII.] 



' History. 



The oldest remains of British fossil birds are recorded by Sir Charles 

 Lyell as having been first found in 1858, in the Cambridge Upper 

 Greensand *. This stratum still continues the only member of the 

 British Secondary deposits in which the bones of birds have been 

 identified by morphological characters ; for though the Rev. Mr. 

 Dennis had previously asserted the occurrence of birds in the 

 Stonesfield Slate t, on the evidence of the microscopic structure of 

 osseous tissue, it is safer, in the absence of recognizable bones, to 

 believe that the ornithic structure he detected was found in an 

 ornithosaurian rather than in a true bird. The discovery of bird- 

 bones in the Cambridge Greensand was made by Mr. Lucas Barrett, 

 F.G.S., then Assistant Naturalist to the late Professor Sedgwick in 

 the Woodwardian Museum of the University of Cambridge ; but I 

 am not aware that Mr. Barrett ever published any account of his 

 discovery. The bones are mentioned by Lyell as " the remains of a 

 bird which was rather larger than the common Pigeon, and probably 

 of the order Natatores, and which, like most of the Gull tribe, had 

 well-developed wings. Portions of the metacarpus, metatarsus, tibia, 

 and femur have been detected ; and the determinations of Mr. Barrett 

 have been confirmed by Professor Owen." What became of Mr. Bar- 

 rett's specimens I was never able to find out. They were not in the 

 AYoodwardian Museum when I succeeded to Mr. Barrett's duties in 

 1859 ; and the whole of the remains to which I shall have to refer 

 were collected subsequent to that date. Professor Owen, in his 

 ' Palaeontology,' remarks %\ — " One of the evidences of birds from the 

 Cambridge Greensand, transmitted to the writer by their discoverer, 

 Mr. Barrett, is the lower half of the trifid metatarsal, showing the 

 outer toe-joint much higher than the other two, and projecting 

 backwards above the middle joint; it indicates a bird about the size 

 of a Woodcock." 



In the ' Annals Nat. Hist.' for August 1866 I mentioned, in a 

 Note on new Genera of fossil Birds, that I had collected or seen from 

 the Cambridge Greensand cervical, caudal, and dorsal vertebrae, 

 proximal and distal ends of the tarsometatarsus, proximal ends of 

 tibiae, proximal and distal ends of femora, humeri, metacarpal bones, 

 &c, and suggested that the typical species should be called Pela- 

 gornis Barretti. In my ' Index to Aves, Ornithosauria, and Keptilia/ 



* Supplement, Elements of Geology, 1859, p. 40. 

 t Quart. Journ. Micr. Sci. vol. v. (1857) p. 63. 

 \ Second edition, 1861, p. 327. f 



