I?o BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 



swimmers as well as flyers, some of them with 

 jaws full of powerful teeth. It is in this period 

 that nature has made indelible sketches on the 

 rocks, lithographic studies of her great future 

 work, so to speak ; work that man is now so 

 recklessly destroying forever. In England 

 the eocene has furnished a hint of the king- 

 fishers and the heron family. In France most 

 interesting discoveries have been made in the 

 Paris basin, and in formations of the same 

 horizon. Fossil feathers, fragmentary skele- 

 tons, and even eggs, have been found, the last 

 mentioned in the marl deposits near Aix in 

 Provence. From lacustral beds in Auvergne 

 and Bourbonnais a great number of birds have 

 come to light, nearly fifty distinct species hav- 

 ing been described. The marl of Ronzon has 

 given up an ancient plover, a gull, and a fla- 

 mingo, very different from presently existing 

 species. 



Coming to our own country we step at once 

 amongst the choicest records of the rocks. 

 Beginning with the Jurassic formation, we find 

 in the upper beds of the period in Wyoming 

 the remains of a bird somewhat larger than 

 our well-known great blue heron (Ardea hera- 

 dias). It was probably a toothed bird, but re- 

 sembled the RatitcB in other respects, and was, 

 perhaps, not a flyer. 



The cretaceous birds of America all appear 

 to be aquatic, and comprise some eight or a 

 dozen genera, and many species. Professor 

 Marsh and others have. found in Kansas a 

 large number of most interesting fossil birds, 

 one of them, a gigantic loon-like creature, six 

 feet in length from beak to toe, taken from the 

 yellow chalk of the Smoky-Hill river region 



