28 THE WILD TURKEY AND ITS HUNTING 



sible, we must dip into the past many centuries 

 prior to the discovery of the New World by 

 those early navigators. We must go back to the 

 time when it was questionable whether man ex- 

 isted upon this continent at all. In other words, 

 we must examine and describe the material rep- 

 resenting our extinct turkeys handed us by the 

 paleontologists, or the fossilized remains of the 

 prehistoric ancestors of the family, of which 

 we have at hand a few fragments of the greatest 

 value. These I shall refer to but briefly for 

 several reasons. In the first place, their tech- 

 nical descriptions have already appeared in 

 several widely known publications, and in the 

 second, what I have here to say about them is in 

 a popular work, and technical descriptions are 

 not altogether in place. Finally, such material as 

 we possess is very meagre in amount indeed, and 

 such parts of it as would in any way interest the 

 general reader can be referred to very briefly. 



The fossil remains of a supposed extinct tur- 

 key, described by Marsh 1 as Meleagris alius from 



1 Marsh, O. C. Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci., Phila., 1870, p. 11. Also Am. 

 Jour. Sci., IV, 1872, 260. In a letter to me under date of April 25, 1912, 

 Dr. George F. Eaton of the Museum of Yale University, New Haven, 



