FOSSIL BIRDS AT VERO. 
39 
performing and has performed as State Geologist of the State of 
Florida. 
ARDEA HERODIAS, Stratum 3. 
(Plate II., Fig. 17.) 
No. 6932. There are two pieces of fossil bird bones bearing this 
number in the collection; one of them is shown on Plate II., Fig. 17, 
and will be described below. The other is a piece of a long bone— 
that is, a portion of a humeral shaft of a rather large bird, and it is 
so fragmentary as to be valueless as a specimen for reference. The 
other (Plate II., Fig. 17) is the distal third of the left tar so-metatar¬ 
sus of an adult Ardea herodias and probably differed in no marked 
respect from that species as we now meet with it in the existing 
avifauna of Florida. Possibly it may have been a subspecies of 
Ardea herodias; but there is no telling in regard to that from a 
fossil bone. 
MYCTERIA AMERICANA (?) Pleistocene, Stratum 3. 
(Plate II., Fig. 19.) 
No. 7000. An imperfect distal third of a right tarso-metatar- 
sus of a large .wader, more or less imperfect, and trochlese nearly all 
broken off. Upon comparing this imperfect fragment with the cor¬ 
responding bone from a skeleton of Mycteria americana in the col¬ 
lections of the U. S. National Museum (No. 1507), it is found to 
agree very closely with it in nearly all the characters, and such 
differences as the fossil bone presents in this comparison may be 
entirely due to individual variation. In the fossil, the shaft is a 
trifle stouter and the tendinal groove somewhat wider, while, as a 
matter of fact, the differences are very slight. The probabilities are 
that No. 7000, here described, belongs to a specimen of Mycteria 
americana. 
HUMERUS OF A FOSSIL BIRD (gen. et sp. ?), Pleistocene, Stratum 3. 
(Plate II., Fig. 20.) 
No. 7552. (24). Some of the characters of this fragment 
point to the possibility of its having belonged to some medium-sized 
