BIRDS OF OLD 55 



In the Jurassic, then, when the Dinosaurs were the 

 lords of the earth and small mammals just beginning to 

 appear, we come upon traces of full-fledged birds. The 

 first intimation of their presence was the imprint of a 

 single feather found in that ancient treasure-house, the 

 Solenhofen quarries; but as Hercules was revealed 

 by his foot, so the bird was made evident by the feather 

 whose discovery was announced August 15, 1861. And 

 a little later, in September of the same year, the bird 

 itself turned up, and in 1877 a second specimen was 

 found, the two representing two species, if not two 

 distinct genera. These were very different from any 

 birds now living — so different, indeed, and bearing 

 such evident traces of their reptilian ancestry, that it is 

 necessary to place them apart from other animals in a 

 separate division of the class birds. 



Archseopteryx was considerably smaller than a crow, 

 with a stout little head armed with sharp teeth (as 

 scarce as hens' teeth was no joke in that distant period), 

 while as he fluttered through the air he trailed after 

 him a tail longer than his body, beset with feathers on 

 either side. Everyone knows that nowadays the feath- 

 ers of a bird's tail are arranged like the sticks of a fan, 

 and that the tail opens and shuts like a fan. But in 

 Archseopteryx the feathers were arranged in pairs, a 

 feather on each side of every joint of the tail, so that on a 

 small scale the tail was something like that of a kite; 

 and because of this long, lizard-like tail this bird and his 

 immediate kith and kin are placed in a group dubbed 

 Saururae, or lizard tailed. 



Because impressions of feathers are not found all 

 around these specimens some have thought that they 

 were confined to certain portions of the body — the 

 wings, tail, and thighs — the other parts being naked. 

 There seems, however, no good reason to suppose that 



